FirstLight Fiber has augmented its years-long mission to amass a New England fiber empire with an acquisition more geared toward expanding its enterprise customer base.

The Albany, N.Y.-based company today announced that it has acquired the assets of Manchester, N.H.-based G4 Communications , which includes its Manchester data center. The strategy is something of a departure for FirstLight Fiber , which has focused on building a 190,000-mile fiber network in New England primarily through acquisition. (See Tech Valley Becomes FirstLight Fiber.)

"Our strategic growth plan is to look for dense fiber assets, but this is not a big fiber acquisition for us," says James Capuano, senior VP and chief network officer for FirstLight. "What was really intriguing about G4 was the services they were providing and the success they've had in their market."

G4's enterprise service offerings in the Manchester market echo the data, colocation and voice services FirstLight provides, Capuano says, and give the carrier an edge into new enterprise sectors.

"One of the strategic moves we've been making is to take the services we have in our Albany market and find ways to bring them to other markets," he says. "G4 provides a lot of the same services, so that gives us a jump start there. G4 has also done a very good job of selling into state government and higher ed. That wasn't our sweet spot, so this is a great opportunity to work with those customers."

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The addition of G4's Manchester data center complements FirstLight's existing facilities in Albany; Burlington, Vt.; and Keene, N.H.

"Our data center strategy is really to drive activity on our fiber network," he says. "Our favorite customer is someone who's looking to push their data center out of their building, so we can provide transport between their locations and our data centers."

FirstLight did not disclose financial details of the transaction, which is subject to regulatory approval.

— Jason Meyers, Senior Editor, Utility Communications/IoT, Light Reading