Colt Densifies Back Home in London

Colt announced this morning the completion of an expansion project in London. They have added another 110km of fiber in the London metro area as part of a broader buildout of the Colt IQ Network in Europe.

London, of course, is Colt’s home turf — the acronym COLT having originally referred to “City of London Telecommunications”. Today their footprint hooks up 27.5K buildings across three continents, and it’s not surprising they left the acronym behind a decade ago now. But it’s interesting to see them putting some money to work back home again.

Colt has build out 300km of metro fiber in the key markets of London, Dublin, and Berlin, and has been investing in its Spanish and Eastern European reach as well. The investments come in response to both customer demand and anticipated needs from the upcoming broader rollout of 5G.

For years I thought Colt was an inevitable target of consolidation, and later I thought they might do some of their own. But their owners doggedly resisted temptation and pursued a mostly organic path, and the M&A they did pursue was within the Fidelity family only. Yet with some of the former Interoute and Hibernia fiber assets possibly up for sale now, it’s hard not to think about the possibility Colt might take a swing.  They probably won’t, but still

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Categories: Metro fiber