Zayo Closes on Crown Castle Fiber

At the end of last week, one of the biggest metro and regional fiber deals in recent years finally closed. Zayo has finished off its purchase of Crown Castle’s fiber business, adding some 90K route miles of dense metro fiber to its own reach and connectivity into 40K enterprise locations. The deal brings to something of a conclusion the metro rollup I’ve spent the last decade and a half keeping an eye on.

While with the exception of this deal Zayo and Crown Castle have been relatively quiet on the M&A front in the 2020s, they more than any others built their infrastructure portfolio inorganically. Zayo has now reached 50 deals, but who can count anymore. In recent years, Zayo has focused on operating those assets and on building new fiber routes and other infrastructure, although still on the hunt for more deals as always.

But people sometimes forget that Crown Castle bought its own share, and some of them were quite large: Sunesys, Lightower, Wilcon, 24/7 Fiber Network, Access Fiber Group, FPL Fibernet. Lightower itself did deals for Sidera Networks, Fibertech, Veroxity, and Lexent Metro Connect, while FPL Fibernet acquired its Texas reach from Grande.  That’s quite a trip down memory lane. But on the operational side, Crown Castle’s tower DNA and the metro fiber business never seemed to mesh as well as promised.

In the end, after a lenghy fight in the boardrooms, Crown Castle decided to refocus back on towers, and Zayo backed by those deep private equity pockets at Digital Bridge and EQT was the obvious buyer. Other PE players could have done it too, but Zayo has far more potential synergies and greater operational experience to make the most of the assets.  EQT Active Core Infrastructure acquire the Small Cells business, now called Arium Networks, and Zayo will have a long term commercial agreement with Arium.

Now what? Zayo will have to incorporate these assets and the people behind them. It’ll be a mess, as integrations always are. But Zayo is rather experienced at them, albeit with a few stomachaches in its past.

If you haven't already, please take our Reader Survey! Just 3 questions to help us better understand who is reading Telecom Ramblings so we can serve you better!