Zayo to Buy Crown Castle’s Fiber?

January 30th, 2025 by · 2 Comments

A Reuters report says that Zayo is at the front of the pack of potential buyers for Crown Castle’s fiber and small cell business business. There’s certainly no doubt there is a process underway, as Crown Castle has been trying to figure out what to do with its fiber business for a couple years now and the only question left is how they find the door they seek. And Zayo is perhaps the most obvious potential buyer as well, but they aren’t past the finish line yet.

Crown Castle built its fiber business by acquisition, merging the assets of Sunesys, Lightower, Wilcon, 24/7 Mid Atlantic Network, FPL Fibernet, and Access Fiber Group between 2014 and 2017.  The result was some serious metro fiber infrastructure spanning the country but with real depth in some major markets like NYC, LA, and Florida. The thesis was that the company’s tower business would be augmented by having a complementary fiber network. The rise of 5G was going to make small cells ubiquitous, and become a primary driver of both the fiber and tower businesses.

Some of that certainly happened, but the result was not what Crown Castle expected. The tower and fiber businesses proved difficult to meld into one. The customers were different, the DNA was different, and the investments required were different.  Over time Crown Castle’s fiber business lagged the rest of the field on many fronts. Talk of the division’s potential dried up pretty quickly, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that the corporation itself came to terms with that, and it led to some ugly internal fights about just what to do about it. 

But now we have a process. Zayo and its backers at EQT and Digital Bridge are said to have the high bid right now, but TPG has supposedly also been in the hunt. As a strategic buyer with the assets and operational team in place to generate synergies, Zayo should indeed have the advantage in such a competition. After all, Zayo was often the one that was outbid for each of the assets that Crown Castle bought, although of course Zayo won more of those auctions than anyone over the years.

The price tag people are talking about is in the $8B range. I expect we will soon see a resolution of all this, and I have no reason to doubt that Zayo and its deep pocketed backers will win it if they want to. They know the assets, the integration process, and the paths to growth. But until the deal is done, it’s not, you know, a done deal.

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Categories: Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber · Towers

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2 Comments So Far


  • mhammett says:

    This is a transaction that I would try to get regulatory blocked. A combined Zayo and Crown Castle would have serious adverse effects on the availability of dark fiber.

    • Rob Powell says:

      I imagine that if objections arise, they would likely just be required to divest some assets in certain markets. Especially with the new administration perhaps less likely to interfere with corporate mergers and such.

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