Metro Fiber Providers Q3 Update

November 12th, 2008 by · 3 Comments

Today I am updating my list of metro fiber providers that I last revisited back in August. As usual, I look for metro route miles and raw on-net buildings of all types, and look at the ratio as a raw metric for relative density and penetration. This quarter’s major surprise came in an email from Fibertech, correcting my numbers:

My earlier number for Fibertech was apparently just the central offices they have hooked up to their network, and in fact they had ten times as many total on-net buildings as I had thought. I was surprised because Fibertech is (I think) still running below $100M in annual revenues which seemed low for a company serving 3200 on-net buildings, but apparently the company is able to economically bring buildings on-net at low recurring revenue levels. So onto the list they go, and Fibertech proves to be one of the deepest metro fiber providers on my list.

I was also able to get more information out of FPL Fibernet, which has increased the information on its website substantially. As for the usual guys, TW Telecom added its usual 250-300 buildings for the quarter, and Cogent added its usual 25-30. Zayo’s numbers continue to surge as they both acquire new assets and light existing ones. Optimum Lightpath added a pile of buildings, but even more fiber by acquisition.

Of course, many companies don’t update their numbers so frequently, and the information gleaned from their websites may be out of date. XO continues its silence (come on guys, give me something!), and this quarter Level 3 either didn’t tell us much or just didn’t light many buildings. If anyone from any of the companies on this list (or one that ought to be there) would like to supply an update for the data in my table, please do send it along!

I have decided to use spreadsheets from Google Documents to post tables on this blog from here on out, those who have watched carefully have perhaps seen me try several methods with varying levels of unsightliness. Hopefully this will improve with the new arrangement both for these metro fiber tables and for financial models etc. At the very least, using an iframe lets me include links to sources for the data where possible, just scroll to the right on the table.

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Categories: Metro fiber

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3 Comments So Far


  • Jason says:

    what about Ntelos in VA? Probably 300+ buildings and DukeNet in the Carolinas?

    • ProfessorPlum says:

      Just as a quick point made very late to this thread:

      This analysis only makes sense if each building is roughly equivalent. However, an Optimum Lightpath building tends to be a single customer location. A Cogent building tends to have multiple customers (around 7 for their enterprise business and 50+ for their netcentric business). As a result, Cogent has more than 1 customer per mile and much better economics than Optimum despite lower margins.

      Just worth noodling on.

  • greg says:

    How about Sunesys, which has been making
    a big play in CA constructing fiber for K-12 school districts, and has services in PA as well.

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