The Southeastern metro fiber builder and operator FiberLight has been busy working on a large Texas expansion for a year now, but this week the project more than doubled in scope. With additional anchor tenants in place, FiberLight announced Monday that it has added 4,500 regional and metro route miles of dark fiber to its buildout plans, bringing the total planned footprint to above 9,000 route miles in Texas alone.
In addition to their existing presence in the Texas Triangle and the expansion throughout West Texas that is now more than 50% complete, the plan now includes metro and regional infrastructure throughout central and southern Texas. Austin, San Antonio, Schertz, Corpus Christi, Waco, Laredo will get more fiber. In particular they seem to be looking at helping LTE rollouts, so there is probably another batch of towers to bring on net. Last month FiberLight alluded to larger Texas plans when it raised $105M from CoBank to give it more flexibility for expansion.
In the past few days the company has also moved to bolster its management team. They’ve brought in Paul Pierron as Chief Operating Officer and Betsy Powell as VP of Service Delivery. Both are veterans of the telecom and infrastructure business in the southeastern US, and will certainly give the company’s operations teams a boost.
FiberLight has been widely rumored to be for sale several times over the past two years, but the Thermo Group hasn’t found a buyer willing to meet its price. That could change, but they are obviously prepared to keep on expanding organically for the forseeable future.
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my company is a vendor and customer of Fiberlight and we have dark fiber in Texas and DC with them, Fiberlight is on the uptick non-stop…the steps they are taking internally now from a managmenet and resource perspective is only goign to take them to the next level
I know we all talk about them being a target for acquisitions but with their strong footprint in Atlanta, DC Metro, Florida, and Texas, do anyone see them being an aggressor in a takeover? Maybe Fibertech to grab a northeast and midwest foothold?
Operationally they could easily do so, and I think management would be raring to go if an opportunity arose. FiberLight certainly doesn’t need to sell. However, I think the reason the idea doesn’t get as much play these days is that their owners (Thermo) have been in the game so long and are strongly rumored to be ready to get out rather than ready to double down.