Metro Bytes: Zayo, CenturyLink, USCarrier, Farmington

Several metro and regional items of notice:

Zayo Group (news, filings) is adding a new dimension to its fiber-to-the-tower business. The company says it has formed a new dedicated team to focus on both FTT and Small Cells. Zayo has been one of the most aggressive alternative builders of fiber to towers. They are now apparently finding the economics to work well enough to start looking at even smaller nodes, with 100 small cell locations already on-net. David Dunn will lead the effort. Now, is a small cell on a lamp post an on-net building for the purposes of classification? Hmmmm.

CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings) won a contract renewal to serve Fort Stewart down in Georgia. They’ll be providing $2.1M worth of internet, data, telephony, and other services to support the U.S. Army Base, Fort Stewart houses the 3rd Infantry division and Hunter Army Airfield on its 280,000 acres.

And also in Georgia, USCarrier Telecom says it has completed an upgrade of its network between Savannah and Macon.  They used gear from Cyan, with whom they have been working for a while. Last year they based their Ethernet exchange product on Cyan gear as well.  Interestingly, Zayo still owns a part of USCarrier that derives from the AFS deal, but the two have been at loggerheads over the nature of their relationship ever since that deal.

In New Mexico, the city of Farmington is apparently looking to get more out of some municipal fiber.   They have 81 route miles of fiber that has previously only been used by the local electrical utility.  They’re considering everything from triple play to simply leasing dark fiber, the former being much more expensive and likely to piss off the incumbent telco and cable operator.  Farmington is way up in the northwest corner of the state.

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Categories: ILECs, PTTs · Metro fiber