Birch wraps up its Cbeyond purchase, enhances reach to nearly 200,000 U.S. businesses

Birch Communications has put the final touches on its $323 million acquisition of fellow competitive service provider Cbeyond, creating what it says is a nationwide service provider with about $700 million in annual revenue.

A key point of this deal was scale. The company will now have a nationwide IP-based network that includes about 31,000 fiber route miles, over 550 fiber-lit buildings, 594 network collocations and six data centers. It will also have a total of nearly 200,000 business customers located in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico.

Both companies have been aggressively upgrading their respective networks in recent years.

In May, Cbeyond announced that it was extending dark fiber facilities to small to medium businesses (SMBs) that reside in large, multi-tenant buildings. What was significant about that expansion is it serves six markets, including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Likewise, Birch enhanced its business services capabilities in eastern Kentucky by wrapping up its buildout and integration of 11,520 strand fiber miles.

Although Cbeyond's main focus was on SMBs, the combined company will be able to serve a broader mix of business customers, including enterprises that require a national solution across multiple offices and data centers.

With the completion of this deal, Cbeyond's stock is no longer listed for trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

The acquisition, which is Birch's 21st since 2006, had also gained unanimous approval by the boards of directors of both companies and follows several months of federal and state regulatory review.

For more:
- see the release

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Birch Communications adds Cbeyond to its fold in $323M deal
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Cbeyond brings dark fiber access to SMBs in six Tier 1 markets