Zayo To Acquire First Telecom Services

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Zayo Group announced that it has executed a definitive agreement to purchase First Telecom Services (FTS), a provider of bandwidth infrastructure services throughout the northeastern and midwestern United States. The $110 million cash sale is expected to close by year-end.

The transaction will add more than 8,000 route miles of fiber and approximately 500 on-net buildings to Zayo’s network. FTS has an 11-state footprint in which it is focused on providing dark fiber and wavelength services, with the highest concentration of network and revenue in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Its customers are primarily other telecommunications carriers.

Zayo currently operates in the FTS region. The acquisition will bring new fiber routes to the Zayo footprint, as well as provide the company with ownership of fiber routes in which it currently operates through long-term indefeasible right of usage (IRU) agreements.

Because Zayo and FTS have similar products and customers in the FTS region, it is anticipated that FTS’ products and network footprint will be fully integrated and available to all of Zayo’s customers when the acquisition closes.

Announcement of the pending acquisition comes just after the company completed acquisition of FiberGate Inc. That $117 million transaction added 399 new route miles and 130,000 fiber miles in to Zayo’s network in Washington, D.C., northern Virginia, Baltimore and suburban Maryland.

Three months earlier, Zayo closed its acquisition of AboveNet for $2.2 billion, creating a combined network of 61,000 route miles and 4.6 million miles of fiber that operates in 45 states and seven countries.

In May, Zayo completed the $18 million acquisition of Arialink that added 930 route miles to its network, including 400 miles of dense metro networks in Lansing and Ann Arbor, Mich. Zayo obtained Ethernet, dark fiber amd optical transport services across a 437 on-net building footprint, plus a regional longhaul network and connectivity to smaller markets in central Michigan.