By Jeremy Nobile, Crain’s Cleveland Business
Everstream has announced yet another expansion of its fiber network, this time in Northeast Ohio.
The Cleveland-based telecommunications company, which specializes in a business-only fiber network, reports it has installed an additional 620 route miles of dense fiber through its hometown region. Its Northeast Ohio network now spans from Toledo in the west to Conneaut in the east and reaches as far south as Mansfield.
In total, the Everstream network now includes more than 13,000 route miles. It’s grown that network by about 30% this year across the Midwest as part of a goal to reach 15,000 route miles of fiber in the region — with more than 3,000 on-net locations in 12 markets — by the end of 2020. More than 5,000 of those miles are within Northeast Ohio.
“At the beginning of the year, Everstream announced an aggressive plan to invest $300 million to build a dense, business-only fiber network throughout the Midwest by the end of 2020,” said Everstream president and CEO Brett Lindsey. “Expanding our network in Cleveland to bring better high-speed connectivity to our business customers here has always been a high priority. With the addition of more than 600 route miles in 2019 alone, our Cleveland network is more robust than ever.”
The expansion in Northeast Ohio involves building connections to large “macro” telecommunications towers surrounding Cleveland, which will provide for the installation of small cells for carrier partners required for enabling a 5G network, Lindsey said.
The overall expansion is being supported by AMP Capital, an Australian investment firm that purchased Everstream in September 2018. AMP announced securing $210 million in senior secured credit facilities when it bought Everstream, about $100 million of which is being applied to supporting Everstream’s expansion efforts.
The 2019 expansion started with Milwaukee and Columbus. Most recently, the company bought 200 fiber miles from DataBank. That introduced Everstream to the Indianapolis market, which it intends to completely cover eventually.
New sales teams have been developed in all three of those new markets. Lindsey said the company has added about 100 employees through the year and will likely close out 2019 with approximately 225 people.
He added that revenue growth on the year is about 25%.
Expansion plans for next year call for building throughout Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, including Madison and Green Bay, Wisc., and parts of Kentucky.
“We’re building into Dayton and will finish up the year heading toward Louisville and Lexington,” Lindsey said. “We’re covering the Midwest soup to nuts in all major markets in decent-sized cities.”
Everstream was founded in 2014 as the for-profit subsidiary of OneCommunity, a nonprofit that provided fiber internet to other nonprofits and government entities before evolving to become DigitalC. Everstream became an independent company when it was acquired by M/C Partners of Boston and additional investors in 2015.