Friday Metro: Zayo, UPN, Cbeyond, CenturyLink

Here’s a final roundup of news from the metro this week before everyone heads for the beach.

Zayo is expanding its small cell efforts in eight markets: Chicago, Grand Rapids, Houston, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Louisville, Minneapolis and Phoenix. They are working on both the indoor and outdoor opportunities, which in my mind are very different situations. And we got another data point on Zayo’s purchase of Geo over in the UK via an SEC filing. The price tag turned out to be £175, or $295M or so.

Unite Private Networks has been making enterprise headway out in Nebraska, where they have put together a regional and metro footprint. This week they won a partnership with Lincoln-based Hudl, under which they’ll be providing Ethernet point-to-point between the video software company’s Omaha and Lincoln locations. According to Hudl, the arrangement doubles their bandwidth while halving their cost.

With Birch waiting in the wings, Cbeyond is still forging ahead with its fiber transformation. This week they extended the fiber services they can offer to the SMB with a new buildout strategy. The main targets will be multi-tenant office buildings in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco. I wonder how Birch will approach the fiber question once it closes the acquisition.

And up in Minnesota, CenturyLink has opened its new data center in the Minneapolis-St.Paul market. MP2 is located in Shakopee and will support up to 6Mw of power and 100K square feet of raised floor space, which is a pretty sizeable chunk for that market.  Hmm, I wonder if I ought to think of CenturyLink as another telco that could conceivably buy Rackspace…  They may not have a wireless arm, but they’ve proven pretty adept at the cloud.

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Categories: Datacenter · Ethernet · Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber