Fiber expansion to add 350 route miles to the network
Continuing to expand its fiber footprint, Colorado-based Zayo Group Holdings plans to hook up some 500 Seattle-area towers to fiber as part of a mobile infrastructure expansion strategy.
Zayo is providing the fiber-to-the-tower connections in service of an unidentified “major wireless carrier customer,” according to a company announcement. The expansion includes construction of more than 350 miles of new fiber.
The company said the carrier deal has a 20-year contract term and will generate an “initial unlevered cash flow yield” of $61 million per year. The new fiber is said to serve tower tenants as well as non-wireless customers like universities, school districts, hospitals and content hosting firms.
After this expansion, Zayo said it will have approximately 8,000 towers, including those under construction, connected to its fiber network.
“Zayo has a successful history of leveraging assets and capital associated with signed customer transactions,” Matt Erickson, president and COO of Zayo’s Physical Infrastructure segment, said. “Our extensible network will have the capacity not only to provide FTT infrastructure for one of the nation’s leading wireless carriers but also the fiber capacity that other existing and prospective customers need as they grow.”
Zayo Group tapped its recent acquisition of Latisys to bolster its cloud portfolio with private, public and hybrid infrastructure-as-a-service cloud services for the U.S. and Europe.
Zayo noted the $675 million Latisys acquisition, which it completed earlier this year, as well as recent purchases of AtlantaNAP and France-based Neo Telecoms, as central to the latest offering. The bolstered platform is said to now support value-added managed services targeting performance, security, scalability and continuity.
“These services include security services such as managed firewall, threat management and log management, performance services, such as load balancing, monitoring and database management and a variety of storage and backup solutions, including fully featured disaster recovery as a service,” the company explained.
The new services are also expected to take advantage of Zayo’s 6 million miles of fiber and 45 data centers that it claims currently support more than 7,000 enterprise and government organizations.
