Level 3 Taps CityFibre’s Growing Footprint

CityFibre announced the signing of a new national master services agreement with Level 3 Communications.  The MSA will let Level 3 more smoothly access fiber routes on the rapidly growing CityFibre footprint in metro areas around the UK.

And the first such metro area will be up in the Scottish capital of Edinbugh, where Level 3 will be leveraging the arrangement to add a dark fiber metro ring to its footprint.  Edinburgh has been one of CityFibre’s ‘Gigabit City’ projects since the spring of 2015.  They were planning an initial build of 150km of metro fiber, with 50 downtown, and putting them in range of some 7,000 businesses.

Level 3 of course has an extensive UK footprint, much of which derives from the purchase of Global Crossing which owned the former Racal network.  It’s the backbone of the company’s European business, which has been lagging in recent years.  The addition of some new fiber sources like CityFibre to their arsenal are part of an increased focus on the enterprise side of things as they look to replicate the success they’ve found on that front back in the US.

The big move that Level 3 has been anticipated to make for some years now in Europe is to buy Colt, which was taken private by Fidelity last year.  Such a deal still seems likely once Fidelity is ready to make a move.  With the tw telecom integration now fading into the background noise, there’s not much holding things back on Level 3’s side.

 

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Categories: Internet Backbones · Metro fiber