Zayo has been moving quickly to make use of the assets it acquired over in Europe last year. This morning the announced plans to expand across the Irish Sea over to Dublin, lighting various dark fiber assets along the way.
The purchase of Geo gave Zayo lots of dark fiber in and aroundthe UK, and they’ve lit a bunch of that now to bring Manchester, Birmingham, and Bristol on-net. Their on-net move into Ireland crosses the cable Geo built with ESB and lands at Interxion’s facility in Dublin, and will expand from there. They’re now offering everything up to 100G and it’s on their Tranzact platform as well.
As for timing, the project should be complete in June, with Manchester on-net by the end of this month.
While there’s certainly plenty to do in the British Isles, I can’t help but wonder what Zayo’s next move is in the broader European consolidation movement. There’s euNetworks of course, but with this Irish move I wonder if the Digiweb Group’s Viatel business might not be an even better fit in the short term.
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Categories: Fiber Networks · Metro fiber
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While Viatel looks good on paper, the assets themselves are variable in quality. You’ll remember part of the deal euNetworks did with Viatel for international capacity between its metro areas was contingent on eu rehabilitating Viatel’s fibre in Germany. There are other pieces of the network (duct, fibre) in a poor state.
There have been two Viatel-“networks” in Germany:
1.) The line from the Netherlands over Dusseldorf and Frankfurt to Kehl (Germany) / Strassbourg (France).
This seems to be Viatel fibre in Gasline ducts and was constructed as a part of the PEN-2/Circe2-network from Viatel. If I remember correctly, half of the fibers were sold to Eunetworks and the rest was kept by Viatel (and Viatel also seems to use it today – see Viatel network map).
2.) A fiber ring (over 2.000 km) between several German cities (e.g. Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, Nuremberg, Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne). This was the PEN-3/Circe3-network and built by Viatel together with Carrier1 and Metromedia (“ViCaMe”-Project).
The question is: Who is the owner of the ViCaMe infrastructure today? Viatel had two(?) ducts in this project and apparently sold them to Eunetworks. But this network footprint disappeared from the Eunetworks network map around 2009/2010. So did they sell it again? Later Eunetworks acquired Lambdanet which had a dark fiber network on Gasline fibers – but I don´t know what network they use today…
The Carrier1-Part of the former ViCaMe-network seems to belong to MTI/GLH today, a german provider which offers services for broadcasting companies and also rent fibers to Cogent for their german network.
And what happend to the Metromedia-part of the project? Metromedia had financial problems at this time, so maybe they couldn´t pay for their part and this duct stayed at Viatel (which seemed to be the “boss” of this ViCaMe-Project)? And it was possibly also sold to Eunetworks (which maybe sold it again)?
My understanding of the deal with eu was it mostly covered your #2, it was chiefly to Viatel’s benefit because the ducts were in a poor state of repair and the fibres either broken or never laid, and eu needed to build/repair them and return fibre to Viatel. I suspect that the cost ended up being too much and some intra-city capacity was gained via Teragate as well, so the parties must have come to some sort of settlement, potentially driving deal #1.
So the Carrier1 duct was okay, but the Viatel ducts were not? If I remember correctly, Carrier1 used their part of the ViCaMe network and had several customers on it (and today MTI and their customers like Cogent use it).
As far as I know, the ViCaMe network is build next to highways. Does a cable duct need a lot of maintenance there? There shouldn´t be a lot of other building activities (compared to metro networks in big cities)? How can a fiber duct be damaged there?
The two network assets (#1 and #2) were sold at the same time in one agreement. So I don´t think that Eunetworks could give back #2 and then acquire #1 in exchange for it.
Maybe the german ring became too expensive for Eunetworks – I´ve already wondered if they have so many customers that they really need a complete fiber ring (cable + duct) on their own. But it´s interesting that you cannot find any information about a new deal with Viatel or another carrier concerning that network.