- Cox sold some non-strategic fiber assets to Ziply this week
- The assets will help Ziply expand into fiber and services for enterprises
- For Cox, it provides money at a time when they recently announced layoffs
Cox Communications owns two companies that provide fiber broadband for enterprises — Unite Private Networks (UPN) and Segra. And this week Cox cleaned up the portfolio of these companies by selling the Pacific Northwest assets of UPN to Ziply Fiber.
Both UPN and Segra provide fiber optic communications services to commercial enterprises as well as organizations such as schools, governments, service providers and hyperscalers.
Ziply will acquire UPN’s fiber assets, network and customers in Washington, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. The acquisition will add more than 7,000 fiber miles in these states, allowing Ziply to provide both lit and dark fiber services to its commercial customers.
“UPN has been a top-of-the-line provider of private fiber networks for more than 25 years, and they’ve built a solid reputation both nationally and here in the Northwest,” said Harold Zeitz, CEO of Ziply Fiber, in a statement. “Expanding our commercial footprint in the Northwest has been a priority for us this year.”
Zeitz added that UPN’s assets will allow Ziply to add new territory that can help it “edge-out” on the residential side of its business, as well.
Once the acquisition is complete, Ziply will be able to offer a variety of additional commercial fiber services on its own network, including 100G wavelength, 400G wavelength, 10 and 100G IP transit, 10G ethernet, dark fiber, cloud on-ramps, IP transit and peering and metro and long-haul routes.
Ziply is in the process of being acquired by Bell Canada, and Fierce Network recently spoke with Zeitz about that transaction. Zeitz said Bell Canada wants Ziply to accelerate its fiber builds and to expand its business.
Cox/UPN/Segra
Cox Communications purchased UPN in 2023, and it already owned the commercial services business Segra. UPN and Segra are very similar in that they provide fiber infrastructure and services to business customers, and they don’t do any residential broadband.
A spokesperson for UPN/Segra said the company is in the process of rebranding and changing its name this month to simply “Segra.” The combined company owns 44,000 routes miles across 24 states, primarily focused in the Midwest and the Atlantic Seaboard.
In terms of the sale of the Pacific Northwest assets to Ziply, the spokesperson said, “We sold remote networks in non-strategic markets to support our strategic goals.”
Fierce Network asked Andrej Danis, partner and managing director of AlixPartners, why Cox would be selling assets of UPN, which it so recently purchased. Danis said, “Cox announced in September they are reducing corporate headcount. Now, they are selling certain assets. If you look on the map of Cox, these assets are very far away from the core of the portfolio.”
Danis said that when capital costs were low it was fine to have far-flung assets. But now, “it’s a synergy game” and Cox doesn’t have the bandwidth to deal with remote assets where it doesn’t normally operate.
The Segra spokesperson declined to say whether Segra would divest other remote assets. But Danis said they “probably will" to the extent other assets are outside of its core markets.