Zayo has completed its $41 million purchase of Access Communications, a deal that immediately expanded its fiber network and on-net building reach in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.
Access is Zayo's latest acquisition of a service provider focused on providing dark fiber services. With this purchase complete, Zayo now has an additional 1,200-mile metro fiber network that connects over 500 on-net buildings, including a mix of data centers and carrier hotel sites.
In the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, the competitive carrier currently operates a 2,500-mile network that was built organically to accommodate customer expansions and acquisitions of other regional service providers.
Dan Caruso, president and chief executive officer of Zayo Group, said in a release that "Minnesota is an important market for us to grow our network with a large base of wireless backhaul customers, Fortune 500 enterprise headquarters and a growing data center presence."
Outside of Minneapolis-St. Paul, the service provider built a middle mile fiber network in Anoka County that was funded by a $13.4 million grant in 2010 from the Federal Reinvestment and Recovery Act (FRRA) Broadband Opportunity Program.
Acquiring regional and multi-state fiber providers has been an ongoing theme at Zayo.
In addition to Access Communications, the service provider has purchased four other regional service providers, including USCarrier, FiberGate, First Telecom Services and Litecast. Each of these deals has deepened its fiber footprint in various parts of the United States and expanded its set of retail and wholesale customers.
For more:
- see the release
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