Lightpath agreed to acquire substantially all of the assets of United Fiber and Data (UFD), which owns and operates a diverse 323-route mile, high-fiber count network between New York City and Ashburn, Virginia. UFD also owns a 79-route mile metro network in New York City and New Jersey, including connectivity to over 350 enterprise and data center locations and a high-fiber count crossing of the Hudson River, which will add capacity to Lightpath’s three existing Hudson River crossings.
- UFD’s New York City-Ashburn network offers high-fiber counts, the latest optical technologies from Ciena, and will support dark fiber, Ethernet, and wavelengths up to 800 Gbps.
- UFD’s network is geographically diverse from typical long-haul routes along the I-95 corridor and will enhance Lightpath’s network of over 20,000 route miles, connecting over 15,000 service locations, including over 140 data centers and 7 cable landing stations.
- The combination of networks will allow Lightpath to offer geographically diverse, high-capacity services from commercial enterprise buildings, cable landing stations, and data centers along the east coast, directly to the Ashburn ecosystem.
UFD customers will gain access to the entire Lightpath network as well as the entire service portfolio, including Wavelengths, Ethernet, Internet, Private Networks, Dark Fiber, LP FlexNet, Voice, Security Solutions, and other Managed Services. Additionally, customers will be able to utilize Lightpath services to connect to over 140 data centers, 7 cable landing stations, and all major cloud providers.
Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal is expected to close in Q3.
“The addition United Fiber & Data is a natural extension of Lightpath’s expansive Greater New York City Metropolitan fiber assets, increasing our ability to serve high-capacity customer needs into the Ashburn data center ecosystem and further enhancing our Manhattan metro coverage where we will serve nearly 1,500 enterprise and data center destinations, a 5x increase over the past 3 years,” stated Chris Morley, CEO of Lightpath. “This represents a continuation of Lightpath’s strategic investment thesis of creating critical fiber infrastructure in attractive and high growth markets for the benefit of our Enterprise, Hyperscale, and Wholesale customers.”
- Altice USA owns a 50.01% interest in Lightpath and Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners (MSIP) owns 49.99% of Lightpath.