sidera announced today that it has agreed to purchase the Long Island Fiber Exchange (LIFE). In doing so, they and their new owners, ABRY Partners, have made a down payment on their promise to use the former RCN Metro assets as a platform for consolidation in the metro fiber space.
LIFE’s network consists of 900 miles of fiber on, you guessed it, Long Island – stretching across Nassau and Suffolk counties and hooking up 550 lit buildings. It’s a good match for Sidera, which despite its extensive coverage everywhere else in the New York metro area, doesn’t have much as much to the east of Queens as far as I know. There has been increasing interest in fiber and facilities in the area, perhaps due to proximity to the cable landing stations out there.
Sidera seems likely to have further M&A interest, if they can just find the right targets. This one fills a hole on the company’s eastern front, but I suspect that future deals might aim at the larger one to the west between the NYC and Chicago metro areas – if they can find one. Perhaps either First Communications’ metro fiber in northern Ohio or DQE out in Pittsburgh would make sense, if they are interested. Neither has shown up on my radar yet.
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Categories: Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber
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