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Type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | Telecommunications IT Services |
Areas served | Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest US, London, Toronto |
Key people | Rob Shanahan – President and Chief Executive Officer |
Parent | Crown Castle International Corp. |
Website | Lightower.com |
Lightower Fiber Networks, founded in 2006, was a provider of telecommunications and IT services. It offered cloud computing, colocation hosting, and connectivity.
The company's network spans the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest United States including Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, DC, and New Hampshire. [1] Additionally, Lightower offers service in both Toronto and London. [2] The network comprises over 33,000 route miles of fiber. [3] [4] [5]
Lightower’s products include network and video transport, alternative access, nationwide long haul services, dark fiber, Ethernet, and cloud computing services. Lightower has built out access to over 22,000 service locations throughout the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest including 275+ data centers and 5,000+ wireless towers, rooftop cell sites, and small cells. [6] [7]
Customers include Fortune 500 businesses, enterprise, carriers, financial services, media, healthcare, education, and government. [8]
The company was acquired by Berkshire Partners in December 2012 when it also acquired Sidera Networks and announced plans to merge them under the Lightower brand. Its previous owners were M/C Partners and Pamlico Capital (the investing unit of Wachovia before its takeover by Wells Fargo. Those two companies had bought it from National Grid in 2007. [9] Lightower was bought by Crown Castle in July 2017, and no longer exists as a separate company. [10] [11]
The company was the title sponsor of the Lightower Conference Classic, now called the Roc City Hoops Classic.[ citation needed ]
Crown Castle is a real estate investment trust and provider of shared communications infrastructure in the United States. Its network includes over 40,000 cell towers and nearly 80,000 route miles of fiber supporting small cells and fiber solutions.
PMC-Sierra was a global fabless semiconductor company with offices worldwide that developed and sold semiconductor devices into the storage, communications, optical networking, printing, and embedded computing marketplaces.
Sprint Corporation was an American telecommunications company. Before it merged with T-Mobile US on April 1, 2020, it was the fourth-largest mobile network operator in the United States, serving 54.3 million customers as of June 30, 2019. The company also offered wireless voice, messaging, and broadband services through its various subsidiaries under the Boost Mobile and Open Mobile brands and wholesale access to its wireless networks to mobile virtual network operators.
Equinix, Inc. is an American multinational company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that specializes in Internet connection and data centers. The company is a leader in global colocation data center market share, with 210 data centers in 25 countries on five continents.
Telecity Group plc, was a European carrier-neutral datacentre and colocation centre provider. It specialised in the design, build and management of datacentre space. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange until it was acquired by Equinix in January 2016.
Windstream Holdings, Inc., also doing business as Windstream Communications or Windstream, is a provider of voice and data network communications, and managed services, to businesses in the United States. The company also offers residential broadband, phone and digital TV services to consumers within its coverage area. It is the ninth largest residential telephone provider in the country with service covering more than 8.1 million people in 21 states.
Electric Lightwave, was originally formed in 1988, by John Warta, John Rivenburgh, Earl Kamsky and Richard Furnival. The company was initially formed to compete with US West and GTE in the Pacific Northwest. Portland General Electric was an initial investor, then Citizens Utilities became the largest investor in 1990. ELI became the first company to compete locally in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and one of the first in California and Arizona.
Verizon Business is a division of Verizon Communications based in Basking Ridge, New Jersey that provides services and products for Verizon's business and government clients around the world. It was formed as Verizon Business in January 2006 and relaunched as Verizon Enterprise Solutions on January 1, 2012. Between April 2014 and October 2016 its president was Chris Formant. Since November 2016 George J. Fischer is Verizon Enterprise Solution's President until he was replaced by Tami Erwin. In 2019 Verizon reorganized into three groups, renaming the former Verizon Business Solutions as Verizon Business.
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Lumen Technologies is an American telecommunications company headquartered in Monroe, Louisiana, that offers communications, network services, security, cloud solutions, voice, and managed services. The company is a member of the S&P 500 index and the Fortune 500. Its communications services include local and long-distance voice, broadband, Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), private line, Ethernet, hosting, data integration, video, network, public access, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), information technology, and other ancillary services. Lumen also serves global enterprise customers across North America, Latin America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific.
CoreSite Realty Corporation is a real estate investment trust that invests in carrier-neutral data centers and provides colocation and peering services. As of December 31, 2019, the company owned 23 operating data center facilities in 8 markets comprising over 4.6 million net rentable square feet. The properties are in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Northern Virginia, San Francisco/San Jose, California, Santa Clara, California, and the Washington, D.C. areas. The company has over 1,350 customers including enterprises, network operators, cloud providers, and supporting service providers.
Lexent Metro Connect was a New York City based neutral telecommunications provider that owned, operated, built and maintained its own dark fiber network in New York, Northern New Jersey, and surrounding areas. Based in New York City, Lexent provided services in the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, as well as in Northern New Jersey. It had 150 fiber route miles and served over 200 commercial buildings.
Sidera Networks is a New York City-based, privately held, United States owned, telecommunications company that provides fiber optic-based network solutions to the carrier, financial services, education, healthcare, government, legal services and media industries. The company was acquired by Lightower Fiber Networks on April 11, 2013.
123.Net Inc., also known as 123Net, is a telephone, Internet, and colocation provider headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, in the United States. It was one of the first Competitive Local Exchange Carriers to interconnect with AT&T and Verizon for the purposes of offering services through the public switched telephone network. The company operates as an independent and privately held telecommunications provider with services in the midwestern United States.
Zayo Group Holdings, Inc., or Zayo Group, is a privately held company headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, U.S. with European headquarters in London, England. The company provides communications infrastructure services, including fiber and bandwidth connectivity, colocation and cloud infrastructure. Zayo's primary customer segments include wireless carriers, national carriers, ISPs, enterprises and government agencies. Zayo Group was built largely through acquisitions; it took over thirty companies from 2007 to 2014, including AboveNet and 360networks. An initial public offering of stock raised $600 million in 2014. In May 2019, Zayo Group agreed to be acquired by global investment firms EQT Partners and Digital Colony Partners in a deal valued at $14.3 billion.
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Birch Communications is an American provider of IP-based communications, network broadband, cloud computing, and information technology services to small, mid-sized, enterprise and wholesale business customers in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. Founded in 1996 in the wake of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, several years later the company began acquiring other telecom companies in an effort to increase its network size and service offerings. Birch Communications raised $77.5 million in funding in 2011, and $110 million in funding in 2012 after it financed a new $90 million facility.
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