Zayo Takes Aim at West Virginia

Zayo Group (news, filings) is expanding its presence in West Virginia, according to a press release this morning.    The supra-regional fiber operator is building out metro network in and around Fairmont, a city to the south of Morgantown.  The new network aims at bringing online the I-79 High Tech Corridor and I-79 Technology Park, home to many federal agency facilities such as the NOAA, FBI, and NASA, as well as West Virginia University.

Zayo was constructed out of diverse fiber assets from many companies, and they have of late been working very hard to make better use of some of the more far flung of those assets.  The West Virginia pieces me largely from its first acquisition of wholesale fiber assets from CityNet, but it was mostly intercity assets with a few on/off ramps here and there – much less dense on the metro side of things than Zayo’s main markets.

Like in LA last week, Zayo is looking for ways to take that starter set and bootstrap its way to a more substantial presence in the region.  Other than nTelos which is about to split off its wireline assets, there isn’t a whole lot of alternative fiber in the state, which makes it easier to find uniqueness.  On the other hand, West Virginia still lies well off the beaten internet track, so there’s a lot of work to do.

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Categories: Metro fiber