Enterprise fiber provider Lightpath unveiled plans to build more than 70 new route miles from Trumbull, Connecticut west into Katonah, New York, as the Altice USA-owned company targets revenue growth.
The company’s forthcoming route will include a link that branches off to the south to connect the city of Norwalk, Connecticut along the way into New York state. A Lightpath representative told Fierce construction on the project is expected to run into mid-2023 but the network will be incrementally available to customers as work progresses.
Asked why it chose this particular area for an expansion, the representative said a customer was a catalyst for the build but this part of Connecticut “is full of enterprises, educators and government organizations” it could target.
“We will continue to build to where we see customer demand and opportunity. The past 18 months under the new management team has been a very prolific time for the company, and we are just getting started,” the representative added.
Lightpath is jointly owned by Altice USA and Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and has existing operations across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The move to grow its footprint in Connecticut comes as part of a broader expansion effort the company has undertaken over the past year.
In April of this year, it debuted a new 300-mile route between New York City and Ashburn, Virginia to complement its existing paths between the two cities. The latter is a well-known as a major data center hub, housing locations owned by Digital Realty, Amazon Web Services, QTS, Equinix, Rackspace, DataBank and NTT among others.
As of May, Lightpath said it had reached 20,000 fiber route miles and added thousands of service locations to hit a total of 13,500.
Altice didn’t provide a breakout figure for Lightpath revenue in Q2. However, Altice CEO Dexter Goei said during the operator’s earnings call that Lightpath revenue was flat year on year despite a 63% jump in net sales bookings in the quarter. According to Goei, the bookings benefitted from Lightpath’s expansion efforts and new market launches.
The CEO said order entries take time to execute and convert into revenue, meaning that “if we were to install these types of numbers over the next 6 to 12 months, you should kind of look to kind of mid-single-digit growth on the Lightpath product.”