Vocus snaps up Digital River fibre network

Vocus Communications has bought some of the dark fibre assets of Digital River Networks for $3.95 million in cash.

The assets included 59 kilometres of dark fibre mostly in Sydney and Melbourne and customer contracts for dark fibre and metro Ethernet services.

The deal was expected to be completed within a month. It was expected to be earnings accretive in the second half of fiscal year 2012.

Brian Evans, the second largest shareholder in Digital River Networks, said the deal came as a surprise to him after reading about the transaction on the Australian Stock Exchange.

Blake Roet, trustee of one of four other major shareholders, DRN Nominees #1, also was unaware of the transaction when contacted by iTnews.

Vocus chief executive James Spenceley said said the "addition of a dark fibre network brings a new product set to the company allowing Vocus to provide bundled metro fibre services with existing data centre and IP Transit products on a network entirely owned by Vocus.

"This is an important milestone for the company in our strategy to become the leading infrastructure provider to the telco, cloud computing and retail ISP markets," he said.

Spenceley expected Vocus would make "further investments in the fibre network to enhance its reach and sales."

Vocus recently purchased Perth data centre PerthiX plus east coast data centre builder E3 Networks.