There are another 400 route miles or so of fiber on Lightower’s southern frontier this week. The northeastern fiber operator said today that it has completed its expansion in the Washington DC and northern Virginia metro area.
The buildout was announced last summer, a few months after the Sidera merger was completed and Lightower first gained assets this far down the I-95 corridor. Sidera had previously announced a major 1,000+ route mile regional expansion down into Virginia, and Lightower added this additional 400+ route mile metro expansion on top of that.
The new fiber hooks up key sites in DC itself, Montgomery County over in Maryland, and Culpeper, Fairfax, Fauquier, and Prince William counties in Virginia. It was a pretty quick expansion, all things considered, so I’m guessing this is via fiber IRUs to fill out the former Sidera footprint. They’re presumably still building out the regional Virginia fiber network, which covers ground that is rather less traveled.
I still think that Lightower’s aggressive push into Virginia suggests that they may have M&A interest to the south should another opportunity arise. While TWC managed to snag DukeNet, Lightower could be a bidder for an asset like FiberLight.
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Categories: Fiber Networks · Metro fiber
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I think Lightower has two good options left to significantly increase and complement their current footprint. FirstCom would expand on the current footprint and give them greater availability in the NE, Upper NY, add more to the Chicago to NY routes and give them Ohio etc.
To go south, I would like to see them actually look into the Earthlink long haul. It would give Earthlink more spend to build on the Cloud and managed services portfolio they are working on and Im sure they could build in favorable conditions for the network moving forward. Earthlink has already pushed network to the back burner and are not making any significant upgrades to it. Lightower would have a lot of work to do to upgrade and integrate but the fiber assets give great coverage all the way down to Florida. Thoughts?
First sold their fiber to Zayo a little while back, what they still have isn’t really a fit for Lightower I think. Earthlink’s fiber might be interesting but only if it got sold separately, I suspect the legacy CLEC stuff and cloud isn’t a fit either.
Lumos?
Maybe some LH pieces but not anything residential or SMB in nature. Its not their niche.
lightower is kicking butt.