- Zayo closed on Crown’s fiber assets about a year after striking the deal
- With the acquisition, Zayo’s network now spans 224,000 fiber route miles across North America
- Separately, Crown sold its small cells business to the private equity firm EQT
Zayo said today that it closed its $4.25 billion acquisition of Crown Castle’s Fiber Solutions business, expanding its metro fiber footprint and enterprise reach across key U.S. markets.
Zayo’s national network includes long-haul, middle-mile and metro, serving the world’s largest carriers, hyperscalers, AI providers and enterprises at scale. The addition of Crown Castle’s metro and regional fiber assets adds about 90,000 route miles and 40,000 on-net enterprise locations to Zayo’s network.
According to Zayo, this addition will deliver more on-net access, route diversity and capacity in key markets for its existing customers. For new enterprise customers, it adds the scale of Zayo’s national backbone, enabling greater access into data centers, cloud platforms and AI ecosystems.
With the completion of this acquisition, Zayo’s network now spans 224,000 route miles across North America.
While Zayo has completed the acquisition of Crown Castle’s Fiber Solutions business, the EQT Active Core Infrastructure Fund has independently completed the acquisition of Crown Castle’s Small Cells business, which will be called Arium Networks.
Concurrent with the acquisitions, Zayo and Arium Networks have entered into a long-term commercial agreement for Zayo to provide fiber to Arium Networks. The total combined value of the Fiber Solutions and Small Cells transactions is $8.5 billion.
Zayo’s long-haul
Fierce recently spoke with Bill Long, Zayo’s chief product and strategy officer, who said the company signed a new long-haul anchor tenant, which he called “a monster deal.” As part of the new deal, Zayo will build 8,000 more route miles, including six new long-haul fiber routes totaling 3,000 route miles and overbuilds of nine high-capacity corridors covering over 5,000 route miles.
“This is probably the largest long-haul build, new-route build announced in the past 25 years,” said Long. “No one else has done anything even close to this scale in the past 25 years. “We are the only company in the U.S. that has been building at a national scale, not just over-pulling what we already have.”
Crown Castle's angle
For Crown Castle, the sale of its fiber assets is the closing chapter of a long story. At one point, the company was trying to boost its fiber assets. But in 2020, the activist investor Elliott Management penned a letter saying Crown Castle was in need of a makeover and should ditch its fiber ambitions.
Elliott preferred Crown’s tower business and recommended focusing on that, especially for the 5G upgrade cycle.
That may have seemed like good advice in 2020, but now, the 5G upgrade cycle is over, and Crown is suing EchoStar for defaulting on $3.5 billion in tower builds and other services, which Crown rendered as part of its 5G network build.
Crown Castle has updated its 2026 guidance to reflect $40 million of lower interest expense for the year as it’s able to repay the targeted $7 billion of debt two months earlier than the originally assumed closure of June 30, 2026.
Of today’s sale of its fiber assets to Zayo, New Street Research analyst David Barden wrote, “Now that the deal has finally closed, the company’s ability to optimize its transition to a pure play U.S. tower company rises to the forefront. There is absolutely wood to chop, but an early close can only be positive as the company can now more keenly focus.”