Regional broadband provider Vexus Fiber is working to rapidly grow its footprint across Texas and Louisiana, with a company representative telling Fierce it has ramped deployments to a pace of 10,000 new locations per month.
Vexus Fiber was founded in 2019 by parent company Vast Broadband following the latter’s acquisition of small fiber player NTS Communications. Now, Vexus is pushing hard to expand on the footprint and customer base NTS brought to the table, the representative said.
Though it started with around 20,000 residential and business customers in Texas and Louisiana from NTS, Vexus now has about 40,000 customers across the two states. Its primary competitors are AT&T, Altice USA's Suddenlink, Charter Communications and Windstream.
“We have found that existing providers are not adequately meeting the explosion of bandwidth consumption,” the representative said, adding it is “focusing on growing mid-sized communities with fiber-to-the-home networks.”
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Vexus already operates networks in Hammond, Covington and Mandeville, Louisiana as well as Lubbock, Amarillo, Abilene and surrounding areas in Texas. Earlier this week, it announced a $50 million project to build fiber to 40,000 homes and businesses across Lake Charles, Sulphur and Westlake, Louisiana, with construction set to begin in Q1 2022. The news marked the latest in a string of deployment announcements it has made this year.
It kicked things off in February, revealing a plan to cover 30,000 locations in Wichita Falls, Texas. Vexus subsequently unveiled a $50 million plan to deploy fiber to 40,000 locations in Tyler, Texas in May and began construction on that project earlier this month. In June, it outlined a $200 million project to connect 175,000 homes and businesses in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, stating construction would begin by the end of 2021. Another announcement followed in July, this time outlining a plan to bring fiber to 35,000 locations in San Angelo, Texas.
The expansion work is being financed by investors Pamlico Capital and Oak Hill Capital.
As it looks to the future, the Vexus representative said it is “working on identifying communities with limited broadband options.”