Yesterday there was another bit of consolidation in the world of metro and regional fiber. Cable ONE has agreed to acquire Clearwave Communications.
Clearwave operates a regional and metro footprint in southern Illinois that spans some 2,400 route miles. They have some 2.700 on-net buildings, from enterprises to towers to data centers. We actually had Clearwave CEO Matt Dement on here earlier this year for an Industry Spotlight.
Cable ONE is a cable MSO with assets in 21 states. Notably, Illinois is actually not one of those states although it’s adjacent, suggesting that the MSO is looking beyond its franchise footprint for fiber opportunities. I wonder what else they might be interested in.
Financial terms were not disclosed, but the deal is expected to be complete in Q1 of next year. UBS advised Cable One, and Bank Street Group and Stephens advised Clearwave on the transaction.
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CableOne acquired NewWave, which is in Illinois.
Maybe we can get the Clearwave network onto our St. Louis IX now. They didn’t seem to understand Internet exchanges when we talked.
Thanks for that info, I had forgotten about the NewWave deal. So there is some overlap after all then.
LULZ. I thought maybe they just were uninterested in /your/ exchange, but a peeringdb search turns up no mention on any other IX…. A telecom company (and one that focuses on biz internet, no less) that doesn’t understand the concept of an exchange? Its shocking they weren’t more successful!
We, unfortunately, encounter this a lot. Regional networks that are too small to think they have a shot at “tier 1”, but are definitely big enough to see the advantage of an IX and can afford any overhead of it.
One once said they had something like 100G of transit, why would they need an IX? Well, you probably wouldn’t need 100G of transit if you were on some IXes.
Big enough to not need the cost savings of an IX. Big enough to not care about customer experience. Small enough to not actually have competent staff.
I think a lot of this is because vendor-based education tracks focus on enterprise education and not service provider education.