By Jeremy Nobile, Crain’s Cleveland Business
Everstream’s latest expansion bridges the telecommunications company into Milwaukee as it continues to build out its Midwest coverage.
The Cleveland-based, private equity-backed company announced Tuesday, Oct. 29, that it has completed two high-capacity fiber rings, totaling 172 network miles, encircling the western suburbs of downtown Milwaukee. Those routes will be lit next month.
That’s roughly one-third of its planned network in the Greater Milwaukee area of 560 miles of fiber scheduled to be completed by the end of 2020.
“Milwaukee was recently named one of the top 50 places to start a business by Inc. magazine and will soon host one of the largest gatherings held every four years: the Democratic National Convention,” said Everstream president and CEO Brett Lindsey in a statement. “These growing businesses and large-scale events need greater access to high-capacity fiber connectivity to be successful, and Everstream’s network was built from the ground up for businesses requiring reliability, speed and scale.”
He added, “This will provide these organizations, as they scale, with direct access to our more than 10,000 route miles of fiber and connections to dozens of data centers throughout the Midwest.”
Coinciding with the new fiber network in Wisconsin, Everstream said it grew a downtown Milwaukee office to at least 20 new employees, including a sales team and field engineers, which is about the standard for markets into which it builds.
The company said it’s invested about $8 million in the project so far and will invest $27 million as part of the overall Milwaukee expansion.
Everstream said it is on track to grow to more than 15,000 miles of fiber with more than 3,000 on-net locations in 12 markets across the Midwest by the end of 2020. The business currently has about 208 employees, excluding those being hired into the new Wisconsin office. It started the year with 101, so it’s more than doubled headcount since then.
Everstream — whose high-speed, low-latency connections can accommodate converged internet, voice and data services at speeds of up to 100 Gbps — has been growing aggressively since being acquired by Australian investment firm AMP Capital in September 2018.
Most recently, on Oct. 1, Everstream said it signed a definitive agreement to buy more than 200 miles of fiber network and its competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) operation from Indianapolis-based DataBank — also building on its Midwest growth strategy — where it’s also opened an office of about 20 people. The acquired assets were previously owned by telecommunications company LightBound, which was acquired by DataBank in December.
In August, the company completed an 80-mile fiber ring circling Columbus, where it also recently opened an office with 21 employees. The company said it would create 40 full-time-equivalent positions in Columbus at the time, as well as 50 in Cleveland, as part of its commitment to the state, which awarded Ohio Job Creation Tax Credits to Everstream in December 2018.
AMP Capital is financing those expansion efforts. The firm announced securing $210 million in senior secured credit facilities when it bought Everstream in 2018; about $100 million of that is being applied to supporting Everstream’s expansion efforts.
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.