Zayo, Equinix Close Deals while BT Gets the Green Light

Three of the significant M&A deals in the telecom and internet infrastructure world saw significant news this morning.

Zayo has closed its CAD$465M purchase of Allstream from MTS.  The deal adds 12,500 route miles of longhaul fiber and 5,500 route miles of metro fiber to their network, hooking up some 3,300 on-net buildings.  The deal makes Zayo a significant player in the Canadian marketplace overnight.  It also gives them a big integration job in which they will reorganize things into infrastructure business and a voice, UC, and small enterprise business that they will likely sell or spin off at some point.  With a multiple of less than 5x, there’s a lot of upside to the deal, but there is also perhaps risk as well.

Equinix polished off its $3.8B acquisition of TelecityGroup.  The deal double’s Equinix’s European business, making them the 800kg gorilla rather than merely the 800lb gorilla on the continent.  They add seven new markets and 1,000 net new customers, entering new countries like Turkey and Bulgaria.  Along with the Bit-isle deal, Equinix has some significant international integration projects to be working through in 2016.

And in the UK, BT won a nearly total victory as regulators approved its $18B acquisition of Everything Everywhere, the mobile joint venture of DT and Orange.  No conditions were attached, and by the end of January BT should be in possession of a mobile business for the first time in a decade.  They’ll go from zero to 33% marketshare when that happens, potentially shifting the UK mobile market in unpredictable ways.

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Categories: Datacenter · Fiber Networks · Mergers and Acquisitions · Wireless