Alex West (Swoop)
Swoop has acquired Luminet and its Sydney-based dark fibre network for a purchase price of $8 million.
The network consists of dark fibre in the Sydney CBD and outer metro areas, connecting data centres and hyperscale facilities.
Meanwhile, the purchase price consists of $5.58 million in cash on completion, which is expected to be on 28 February, and $1.6 million in Swoop shares.
ARN understands the business has only one part-time employee. Following the transaction, that employee and the Luminet business entity will be phased out.
Swoop chairman James Spenceley claimed when he was at Vocus, which was from 2007 to 2016, the telecommunications provider tried “on multiple occasions” to acquire Luminet’s network, as he claims it has unique and independent duct access between many major Sydney data centres.
He also said it has one of the highest core counts connecting those data centres.
“Sydney dark fibre is in high demand and is an important product in the market and the Swoop team is very excited to be entering this market again,” he said.
Swoop CEO Alex West echoed Spenceley’s sentiments, saying that the acquisition “is a great fast track” for the fixed wireless and wholesale network infrastructure provider’s investment in dark fibre.
“The 58 [kilometre] network covers many of Sydney’s most important interconnection points, data centres as well as Hyperscale facilities,” he said.
“Like our previous fibre acquisition [of Adelaide’s iFibre network in January], it is predominantly built in its own ducts and with significantly larger fibre core counts presenting great opportunities for growth.
“As we saw from Vocus, we started the fibre journey with roughly the same amount of cable on some of the same key routes that saw us grow into one of the largest fibre infrastructure providers in Australia.
"We are excited to bring together this asset along with one of Australia’s largest fixed wireless networks to continue to offer great solutions to our growing customer base.”
When completed, this will mark the eighth acquisition for Swoop since its listing on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) in May 2021 after forming in February of that year by way of a reverse takeover deal worth $61.3 million.
Those acquisitions include Speedweb and Community Communications (ComComs) in June, Beam Internet in July, and Countrytell and VoiceHub Group in October, in addition to iFibre in January.
