New dark fiber customer leads to Uniti Fiber footprint expansion

Uniti Fiber, a fiber-optic network services provider formed when communications REIT Communications Sales and Leasing, Inc. (CS&L) augmented its existing assets through the acquisition of Tower Cloud and PEG Bandwidth, says it will expand its fiber footprint in the Quad Cities/Davenport area of Iowa in Peoria and Rockford, IL. The three expansion projects will help Uniti Fiber fulfill a contract for dark fiber from a customer the company describes as "one of the nation's largest wireless carriers."

One or another of the companies and operations combined to create Uniti Fiber has served portions of Iowa and Illinois since 2011. The company currently has a network footprint in the two states of more than 90,000 fiber miles that serves more than 400 customer connections. Overall, the company's fiber-optic network spans more than 580,000 fiber miles across 19 states, with local access to over 2,500 municipalities and dozens of utilities.

"The expanded communication infrastructure resources in these markets offer an incredibly high-bandwidth, low-latency network which lays the foundation for future growth and enhanced service availability," said Ron Mudry, president of Uniti Fiber. "This expansion deepens our strong commitment to these underserved regions and creates a denser fiber network that provides new and enhanced connectivity options with major commercial data centers from Chicago to St. Louis."

CS&L was formed when Windstream spun out certain of its network assets in 2015 into a real estate investment trust (REIT; see "Windstream plans REIT to own fiber and copper networks"). The REIT closed the acquisition of PEG Bandwidth in May of this year and acquired mobile backhaul and enterprise services provider Tower Cloud this past August.

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