US tower operator Crown Castle International has agreed to acquire privately held Lightower Fiber Networks for about $7.1 billion in cash, a deal that will make it one of the largest owners of metro fibre in the US.

Crown Castle, which is the largest provider of shared wireless infrastructure in the US with 40,000 towers and 50,000 small cell nodes on air, is buying Lightower from a group of investors including Berkshire Partners and Pamlico Capital.

German company Keymile plans to focus on broadband communications systems, following the sale of its mission-critical communication business unit to Swiss industrial automation specialist ABB for an undisclosed sum.

The company wants to ride the demand wave for broadband, which continues to roll on at breakneck speed. Keymile’s products allow network operators to offer their end customers a variety of voice and data services across all types of fibre-to-the-x access network architectures.

ADVA Optical Networking has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MRV Communications, a California-based provider of packet-optical networking equipment, in an all-stock deal worth $69 million (€60.7 million).

If successful, the acquisition will strengthen ADVA’s optical, Ethernet and software portfolio, and help the company broaden its customer base, especially outside Europe.

The boom in data centre optics is benefitting a small Scottish components start-up: Optoscribe has closed a series B investment round of £1.8 million as it continues to grow.

The funding was led by Scottish business angel investment syndicate, Archangels, supported by existing investors Par Equity, the Scottish Investment Bank, and Optoscribe’s management team.

More than half of the metro WDM bandwidth deployed in 2017 will be coherent 200G or above, with the highest volume coming from compact data centre interconnect (DCI) equipment used by cloud and colocation providers, according to the most recent Optical Applications Report from Cignal AI, a networking component and equipment market research firm.