It looks like industry mergers and acquisition activity is in high gear lately. It’s hard to remember a week when there wasn’t a press release about upcoming M&A activity in the telecom sector, and I have been writing a similar blog every six months. Following is some of the most recent activity.
In the ISP Space. T-Mobile announced it entered two joint ventures to acquire 50% of three U.S. fiber businesses – GoNetspeed, Greenlight Networks, and i3 Broadband. T-Mobile seems to be gobbling up last-mile fiber properties all over the country.
TDS Telecom announced plans to buy Granite State Communications, a telco in New Hampshire with more than 11,000 service addresses.
Truvista Fiber is buying the municipal fiber network from the City of Commerce, Georgia, with plans to expand to reach residential customers.
Middle-Mile / Networks. Zayo just closed on the $4.25 billion acquisition of the fiber assets of Crown Castle Fiber. This adds 90,000 miles of fiber to Zayo’s U.S. network.
The managed service providers Spectrotel and Airespring announced a merger to become more competitive in serving business customers.
GCI in Alaska is acquiring Q Gateway Intermediate Holdings (Quintillion), a fiber infrastructure provider in the state. The purchase brings 1,800 miles of subsea and terrestrial fiber, along with active construction on additional routes.
Lumen is buying the cloud network company Alkira for $475 million. This brings expertise in AI programmable networking. Lumen has obviously decided to beef up its enterprise business now that it recently closed on the sale of last-mile fiber customers to AT&T.
Vendors. Inseego, a wireless edge vendor, is buying the FWA business line from Nokia.
Render Networks is acquiring mPower, a company that makes management tools for electric and water utilities.
Satellite. Amazon announced plans to purchase Globalstar for $11 billion. This jump-starts Amazon’s entry into the direct-to-device market.
The Mother of all Merger Rumors. In what would be the biggest telecom merger ever, Fierce Networks had a story about analysts at New Street Research who are speculating that a merger between Comcast and Charter makes a lot of sense. They said that Charter is still open to further acquisitions after it closes on the merger with Cox Communications. The article even speculated on Charter being an acquisition target for T-Mobile or SpaceX.
We can’t forget the three big ISP mergers of Charter/Cox, AT&T/Lumen Fiber, and Verizon/Frontier. The biggest ISPs are suddenly getting a lot larger.