Zayo Group, based in Colorado, is acquiring Rochester, N.Y. based American Fiber Systems.
Terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed, but a knowledgeable source said AFS fetched between $185 million and $190 million.
Founded in 2000 by David Rusin, a former president of Frontier Communications Inc., the privately held AFS provides dark and lit fiber to businesses.
Zayo Group has grown fast by acquisition, and now operates fiber networks in 23 states, serving 141 markets, including 55 metropolitan markets in the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, Minnesota and Iowa.
Along the way, it has opportunistically gotten into the business voice business, collocation and enterprise communications. There's sometimes a fine line between filling out an adjacency and losing focus, but Zayo has proven to be adept, both at managing its acquisition activities, and taking advantage of business adjacencies.
Though as a general rule consolidation is occurring virtually everywhere in the U.S. communications business, there has been a noticeable pickup in regional fiber network mergers recently.
KDL Inc., of Evansville, Ind., a provider of fiber networks in 26 states; Houston-based Alpheus Communications (News - Alert), which builds and manages the fiber backbone that links major cities in Texas; and Fibertech Networks LLC, which leases fiber networks to banks, colleges and hospitals in the eastern U.S., have hired investment bankers and hope to sell themselves, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
