Brightspeed plans a five-year, $2 billion fiber buildout in 20 states to help meet rural and suburban needs
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved Lumen Technologies’ sale of its incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) business to Brightspeed, Lumen announced Monday. Now that the deal has cleared regulatory approval, the parties expect to close early in the fourth quarter, on track with Lumen’s first intentions announced a year ago.
Lumen first announced plans in August 2021 to sell many of its CenturyLink-branded assets to Apollo Global for $7.5 billion. Under the terms of the deal, Lumen retains 687,000 CenturyLink fiber subscribers and assets in 16 states; Apollo obtains assets in 20 states, mostly in the U.S. Midwest and Southeast, and 59,000 fiber subscribers.
Brightspeed is based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. Apollo created Brightspeed in November 2021 to further its telecom ambitions. In October 2020, the private equity firm acquired a telecommunications platform owned by Lendlease, then in May 2021, it purchased Verizon’s media assets for $5 billion. Shortly before announcing the Lumen deal, Apollo invested $200 million in Utah-based carrier FirstDigital Telecom.
The FCC approval paves the way to “close the digital divide in communities across the country that are most in need of high-quality broadband,” said Tom Dailey, Brightspeed’s VP of public policy and government affairs.
In June, Brightspeed announced that it had received regulatory approval from state governments in all 20 states where it planned to operate fiber services after the Lumen deal. Brightspeed said it will invest more than $2 billion over the next five years to connect up to three million new homes and businesses to fiber broadband connections, “including in many rural and suburban locations where fiber and advanced technology have not yet been deployed.”
At the time of the June state approval, Dailey and the Brightspeed team were champing at the bit to get started. Dailey acknowledged the need for the regulatory process to complete, but said that Brightspeed was wasting no time to get everything in place.
“While we need final FCC approval before we can bring customers onto our network, our Strategy and Operations teams have been working nonstop on the design, construction, and supply chain preparations necessary to hit the ground running on day one,” said Dailey.
In July, Lumen announced the launch of its enterprise edge computing services for the Europe market. The company claims 5 millisecond (ms) latency for 70% of enterprise demand in the UK, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Lumen said it has plans to expand to additional locations by the end of 2022.
Lumen says it operates about half a million miles of fiber, providing services to more than 190,000 building locations and connecting 2,200 public and private third-party data centers. About 42,000 miles of that connects Lumen’s network in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (AMEA). There, it connects to more than 2,500 on-net buildings and 540 data centers.
T-Mobile U.S. made a deal with Lumen in 2021 to use Lumen’s edge infrastructure to help “enterprises effectively build, manage and scale applications across highly distributed environments.” Customers would be able to access “hundreds of thousands of on-net enterprise locations on the Lumen fiber network” using T-Mobile’s 5G network. Also part of the deal, T-Mobile became “a preferred wireless connectivity partner for Lumen.”
