Zayo Group Holdings, Inc. was awarded a $15.6 million, 12-year contract by the city of Fort Worth to provide a dark fiber solution to upgrade its municipal network. The sale underscores a trend toward municipalities, schools and other government entities upgrading outdated networks to meet the growing demand for high-performance connectivity.

“Increasingly, cities and municipal governments are finding that their infrastructure won’t support their growing need for fast, high-performance bandwidth for mission-critical services, including emergency operations,” said Randy Dunbar, senior vice president metro dark fiber at Zayo. “Rather than building their own networks, which are complex and expensive, they’re leveraging Zayo’s infrastructure.”

Zayo started construction on the first phase of a two-year project and plans to connect six core city locations by midyear. When completed, the network will connect over 50 of the city’s facilities along a 411-mile network and will feature a diverse core ring and 64 laterals to connect to outlying facilities. The network will leverage the 2,000-mile fiber-to-the-tower (FTT) network currently under construction in Dallas. Zayo has large and growing fiber networks across Texas, including Houston, San Antonio, and Austin.