Zayo closed on Crown Castle's fiber assets earlier this year. The combined network runs about 224,000 route miles. That makes Zayo one of the largest metro and long-haul fiber operators in the country, second only to Lumen on total footprint.
If you buy dark fiber, wavelengths, or Ethernet transport, this changes your quote sheet. Here is how.
What actually got moved
Crown Castle spent years buying up metro fiber. Lightower. Sunesys. Wilcon. FiberNet. They stitched those networks together and sold transport into towers, data centers, and enterprise buildings. Then the parent company decided fiber was not their business anymore.
Zayo picked it up. The pieces that mattered were the metro rings in about 25 U.S. markets. Boston. New York. Philadelphia. Chicago. Los Angeles. Dallas. Atlanta. Those markets had two real competitors on wholesale fiber. Now they have one.
What this means for dark fiber pricing
Dark fiber has always been a two-quote game. You call Zayo. You call Crown Castle. You pick the lower one, or you take both quotes back to the winner and ask for a better number.
That second call is gone in most of the country.
We are already seeing quotes come back 10 to 18 percent higher on renewals in Boston and Philadelphia. New builds are worse. One route we priced in April 2026 came in at $2,340 per mile per month. The same route in November 2025 quoted at $1,875 through Crown Castle. Same fiber. Same conduit. New owner.
If your dark fiber contract expires in the next 18 months, start the process now. You need to line up alternates before Zayo knows you have no alternates.
Wavelengths and Ethernet transport
Wave pricing has held up better. There is more competition on lit services. Lumen, Cogent, Windstream, and regional players still quote 10G and 100G waves in most of the top 30 markets.
But the floor is moving. A 10G wave in a Tier A market like Dallas was clearing around $1,565 a month for a 36-month term at the start of 2026. In our June sample, the median is $1,720. That is a 10 percent bump in six months. Some of that is new construction cost. Most of it is the merger.
Ethernet transport is similar. EPL and EVPL circuits at 1G and 10G are up 6 to 12 percent depending on the market and the A and Z endpoints. On-net to on-net stayed flat. Off-net grew.
The buildings problem
Here is the piece nobody talks about. Zayo and Crown Castle had lit different buildings in the same cities. If your office was on Crown Castle fiber, you got Crown Castle pricing. Neighbor across the street was on Zayo, they got Zayo pricing.
Now both buildings quote from the same book. If you were on the cheaper side of that split, expect your next quote to move up. If you were on the more expensive side, you probably will not see relief. Merged carriers do not race to the bottom on their own pricing.
What to do in 2026
Three things.
First, if your transport contract has more than 12 months left, do nothing yet. Ride the current rate.
Second, if you are inside 12 months, get quotes now from Lumen, Cogent, and any regional fiber operator in your metro. Crown Castle used to be the swing vote. You need a new swing vote. Sometimes that is a smaller regional player like FirstLight in the Northeast or Uniti in the Southeast.
Third, if you have multiple sites and were splitting between Zayo and Crown Castle for redundancy, that redundancy is gone. Same operator, same NOC, same outage. Add a second physical provider before your next renewal, not after.
The deal closed. The pricing shift is real. Waiting to renegotiate is the expensive move.