Wireless infrastructure provider Crown Castle International has agreed to acquire West Coast fiber-optic network and data center infrastructure provider Wilcon for approximately $600 million. Private equity firm Pamlico Capital is the majority owner of privately held Wilcon. Crown Castle expects the acquisition to close in the third quarter of this year.
Wilcon owns approximately 1,900 route miles of fiber, primarily in Los Angeles and San Diego (see, for example, "Wilcon picks Ciena for California fiber-optic network upgrade"). With the addition of Wilcon, Crown Castle will own or have rights to over 28,000 route miles of fiber.
"The acquisition of Wilcon provides us an extensive set of dense metro fiber assets that will enable us to continue to deliver fiber-fed small cell solutions for our wireless customers in our fastest growing and most active market," said Jay Brown, Crown Castle's CEO. "With its complementary footprint, we expect to benefit in the near-term by leveraging Wilcon's assets to execute on our substantial and growing pipeline of small cells.
"Longer-term, we believe Wilcon's well-located assets across the greater Los Angeles and San Diego metro areas, combined with its currently low utilization rate, provide us with a long runway of growth opportunities to pursue small cell deployments for our wireless customers as they seek to improve and enhance their networks to meet growing demand for high-speed, high-capacity wireless services," Brown concluded. Wilcon has been active in the small cell market already (see "Wilcon targets Los Angeles fiber-optic network deployment at small cell support").
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