ELNK Buys One

Many of you don't know ONE Communications in the Northeast. One Comm's network consists of 629 collocations, connected by more than 11,700 route miles of fiber. "With approximately 1,500 employees, One Comm serves approximately 113,000 small and mid-sized business customers in 17 states across the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest, including the major metropolitan markets of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and the District of Columbia. One Comm's products include a wide range of data, voice (both traditional and VoIP) and integrated voice/data solutions that scale with bandwidths ranging from T1s to fiber-based speeds." [In other words, it's like CavTel and Deltacom: own a bunch of fiber but only sell unprofitable T1 services.]

Well, "EarthLink today announced a definitive merger agreement under which EarthLink will acquire One Communications Corp. (One Comm) for $370 million, which includes payment of approximately $285 million of One Comm net debt. One Comm stockholders have the right to elect to receive the net merger consideration in the form of cash or EarthLink common stock. The transaction purchase price represents a multiple of approximately 3.7x Adjusted EBITDA..." [press release]

We'll see if ELN can find some way to motivate the management of One and Deltacom to actually sell profitable services, because so far they haven't been able to.