Zayo to Build New Heartland Longhaul Route

December 2nd, 2014 by · Leave a Comment

While new metro loops are almost commonplace these days, new longhaul intercity routes are still a rare beast. We’ve seen a few big projects lately though on the east coast with Allied Fiber in Florida and both Lumos and SummitIG in Virginia, and now Zayo says it is building a new dark fiber route much further inland

Zayo-Omaha-DallasZayo will be building new infrastructure along a unique path between Omaha, Nebraska and Dallas, Texas, passing through Kansas City and Tulsa along the way.  It also features a loop to the east through Bentonville and Fort Smith over in Arkansas. If all goes as planned, the new 1,000 mile route will be ready in 2017, with 17 neutral colo huts/sites along the way.

The north-south direction has always had fewer options than east-west when it comes to dark fiber.  Zayo also picked up a similar unique route a couple hundred miles to the east back in the 360Networks deal three years ago that runs between Chicago and New Orleans.  More recently they’ve acquired or built new, unique routes between San Diego and Yuma, Chicago and Denver, and San Francisco and Sacramento.

Zayo went public six weeks ago to great fanfare and with a long resume of M&A.  Of course they’ve built a lot of fiber too along the way, but having one of their first big post-IPO projects be an intercity build sends an interesting message about the path forward when it comes to fiber.

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Categories: Fiber Networks

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