The Move Into Canada

RingCentral has a deal in place with TELUS, a telecom company like AT&T in Canada. 8×8 has had its Virtual Office suite in Canada since 2013. Today, Zayo announced that they were buying Allstream, a division of MTS in Canada. Allstream has a 35,000 km fibre-optic network and provides communications services to enterprise clients including the Canadian government. A good amount of inter-city and metro fiber is in the mix.

“Zayo said it plans to integrate Allstream’s 30,000 kilometres of fibre into its own core operations and create the only “pan-U.S./Canada communications infrastructure provider,” writes the Globe and Mail.

It was a good deal for Zayo at about $500M. Now they can expand in Canada like they have in Europe but with the ability to leverage one of Canada’s largest business to business telecom operator. Zayo is “targeting CAD $300M of revenue, a >40 percent EBITDA” – that is a 5 year ROI.

I think a lot of operators are looking outside the US because the cost of customer acquisition is high here. And maybe being global gets you bigger customers – or at least a different segment of the marketplace.

I also think that there aren’t many more fiber providers in the US that Zayo can acquire — and especially none this big with this much upside.

Tags: fiber, mergers, zayo
Related tags: canada, allstream