It is all about fiber. Whether it is fiber-to-the-home or fiber lit buildings, the bankers love the word fiber. (I will refrain from jokes about constipated personalities here.)
CenturyLink keeps announcing fiber-to-the-home plans. Just the announcement is enough sometimes. However, actually putting fiber in the ground to houses is another story. It is a story that Google Fiber, C Spire and C-Link would prefer you not ask. It's all buzz, spin, noise, but it works on bankers.
TDS is the latest to announce a FTTH plan to overbuild to 25% of their territory. In this Fiberville campaign, they are using the Google inspired pre-sale approach, whereby you make noise, get sign-ups and when you hit a percentage (usually 40%+), then you build.
In the fiber world, Zayo has switched gears from buying more fiber to buying data centers. So someone else will be doing the buying this week. Shenandoah Telecommunications Company in the Mid-Atlantic region is buying NTELOS for about $208M in cash and assumption of approximately $431 million in debt. It is all about the fiber, since ShenTel made a deal with Sprint to take over the NTELOS-Sprint cellular partnership and its 297,500 wireless retail customers. ShenTel is going to continue as a Sprint Affiliate (retail partner).
It is all about buying growth as money is cheap to get right now and there is no such thing as being over-leveraged. It's the 80s!!!
BTW, Alpheus expanded in Texas again organically. "This latest fiber network expansion adds just over 1,000 new near-net buildings for a total of approximately 7,000 near-net buildings in Texas; and the expansion brings the number of businesses able to leverage Alpheus' fiber network and services to 48,000, up from 42,000 earlier this year." reports Channel Vision magazine.
