I was traveling on Friday and over the weekend, time to catch up. The Qwest/CenturyTel deal wasn’t the only one to close:
California’s largest CLEC TelePacific (news) finished off its acquisition of NextWeb, after receiving regulatory approval. NextWeb was Covad’s fixed wireless play, operating in California, Nevada, and suburban Chicago with 3,500 business customers. The California and Nevada pieces fit in very well with their regional focus, but just what they’re going to do with the Chicago piece is an open question. Perhaps there might be some further territorial expansion at some point? They’d fit well with Integra.
Northeastern regional fiber operator Lightower Fiber Networks (news) completed its acquisition of Open Access Inc, giving them greater depth on both Long Island and New York City. The deal adds 230 on-net buildings, bumping up their total to more than 2300. It also adds some regional backbone fiber to their existing presence on Long Island, although I believe there is some overlap there since Open Access built part of their network on Keyspan assets. Lightower has been one of the most aggressive consolidators of metro fiber assets, and I suspect there may be more in the future.
And finally, Earthlink (NASDAQ:ELNK, news, filings) finalized their purchase of privately held One Communications. The final price tag was $370M, including repayment of $282M in net debt and the issuance of 3M shares of common stock. Earthlink will be integrating the One Comm assets into it’s business division, made up mainly of the New Edge Networks and ITC Deltacom assets. None of this looks like the endgame for EarthLink – we’ll hear more from them soon I think.
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Categories: CLEC · Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber
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I’ve been trying to get ahold of someone at CovadTelePacific about one of their towers in Chicago. We both operate fixed wireless off the same tower and I’d like to work on coordination or just an outright take-over of that tower. The Chicago network is the red-headed step child of their operations and this particular tower is even significantly removed from that network.
If one turns up around here, I’ll be sure to send him in your direction!
hot news GC was sold to LVT3!!!!!!
anyone want to take a guess at the multiple/price. I’ll guess 7.2x
I’m still looking for confirmation of this rumor, anybody?
announcement set to go out as early as tonight, friday or monday. if it does happen one would think it would go out friday. lets hope legere gets taken out.