Thank you, everyone for joining this fireside chat this afternoon. We're really happy to host Anterex, tickers, ATEX. It's a company that, you know, kind of falls under the telecommunications subsector, but it's certainly, you know, related to our coverage list and kind of where we're going in terms of looking at grid related names. And so, you know, with that, I'd like to just kind of give a quick run of show. We'll hand the call over to the Antares team for an introduction and then we'll move into Q and A.
If you have a question during Q and A, you can ask it via the chat Q and A box on the Zoom screen or email me or your sales broker here and we'll get the question asked. And that'll, you know, the total run time should be about 45 to 60 minutes today. So again, with that, really happy to host Anterex and I'll hand the call over to Robert Schwartz, Antares' CEO for a quick introduction.
Fantastic. Thank you, Sean. Pleasure to be here today. As you mentioned, I'm Antares' President and CEO. I have Tim Gray here with me, our CFO and Chris Scott McCabe, our Chief Regulatory and Communications Officer.
It's a great time to be talking to you on the heels of our recent announcement of our Encore transaction, our 7th major customer, just about 4 years since we've had the ability to deliver our key service. Let me step back for a minute and just kind of talk about who we are as Antares and the reason for being in this critical time in the energy sector. We're helping utilities build a new digital foundation for the future of our nation's electric grid. And what does that mean? We own a proprietary scarce asset of radio spectrum, 900 megahertz radio spectrum across the nation.
Something that you mentioned earlier that we're a telecom company and our roots were founded by the founders of Nextel. We built the nation's 1st wireless service nationwide. Before AT and T, Verizon, T Mobile, all the services you know, there was Nextel's national network that supported critical infrastructure, importantly, with a differentiated service and a long standing relationship with key sectors, including the energy space. Using that knowledge and capabilities, we've now built a team that now I think is outnumbered by our utility capabilities and experience set because we have this spectrum. And what we're doing is we're helping utilities build very valuable private, secure, resilient communications networks that many are calling kind of the 3rd grid of the energy sector, because the necessity to have resilient private secure communications for so many of the changes that are occurring within the sector that you could teach us even more about that we could talk about on this call today, given all the research we've seen from you.
The needs, the list continues to grow. I've mentioned cybersecurity, decarbonization, distributed energy, now with growing demand for energy across so many new use cases. All of those elements of the transitions that are occurring within the energy sector require much greater situational awareness, much greater control. As we emerge into this digitalization of the grid, that requires a level of connectivity and communications and broadband connectivity and secure broadband connectivity. And that means sensors, controllers, monitors, things that are allowing us to have greater awareness to create better efficiency, to prevent catastrophes.
Unfortunately, they're happening at a growing clip, unfortunately, like what's going on in Houston as we speak. It's allowing us to really be ready for the data revolution that's occurring already, the use of artificial intelligence, the use of the ability of collecting valuable data. And I differentiate because today there's data sets that I kind of call data puddles, right? In the world of data lakes where the goal of every IT organization is to bring together as much information as they can and from that be able to analyze and make powerful decisions. That's not a landscape that utilities have the advantage of having today because of the legacy networks historically they put in place for so many of the communications requirements.
Now that we're making available our nationwide spectrum and we do so that we our standard models, we're leasing long term to utilities, those are 20, 30 year leases with major IOUs, and we've done so. We'll talk about the 7 that we've signed on and the more than 30 that are in our pipeline now. We're allowing them to build on and operate their own private LTE networks. Now each of those networks has their own discrete controlled asset, importantly, that they're capitalizing through their approach with their rate cases. But at the same time, they're part of a nationwide network of networks.
And as we're making greater penetration in the nation, that's really our objective. And I made the reference to our Nextel roots as important because we're coming at this from not as a one off transaction, we're trying to sell widgets to customers. Instead, we've taken a holistic approach, and we've really taken a collaborative approach where our objective, our bold objective is to be the de facto provider of this kind of capability, but humbly to the utility industry. And so as we're working with all of the key parties from the federal and state regulators, the industry associations, the government entities, including the national labs, We're really driving a broader understanding of the essential nature and why there needs to be a centralized coordination of the way this gets rolled out across the nation. So I mentioned the 7 utilities that we've signed on so far.
We can go through the names, LCRA, Ameren, Evergy, SDG and E, Exel, Tampa Electric and Encore most recently. In total, that's about $375,000,000 of contracted proceeds. And those proceeds are being paid upfront in those long term agreements over the 1st several years, because that's advantageous, both for us, to be frank, but more importantly for our customers in their need to put that into their rate cases as they capitalize these mission critical networks. To date, I'm sure you I know Sean, you monitored last quarter, we still have $186,000,000 of that capital to be collected. Those are signed contracts to be collected.
We ended the quarter with $60,000,000 of cash on our balance sheet. So we're debt free. We have a very unique business model and capital structure where we're in an all equity world and we're using that cash already and Tim will talk about later to buy back equity at a fairly regular clip. And so for us, the expansion vectors for here are continuing geographically across the nation. And we'll spend some time talking about the continued demand we see.
And as you know better than us, this is an industry that works hand in hand in box step. And so once we start breaking into this critical mass, we're seeing more and more interest, both nationally, but interestingly regionally. Encore was our 3rd utility in Texas. We now have over 80% of the counties in Texas that are licensed to our customers. And so we're seeing this neighborhood effect, as I'm calling it.
We have Amarin in their neighbor, Evergy. We have expansions happening in other places where we have other customers. And so for us, we see the viral aspect in a positive way of the growth of this network. And it has the network effect. The Metcalfe's law, which says that every time you plug another valuable thing into a network, it makes the network more valuable for everybody.
And so for important use cases like mutual aid, where you can have interoperable communications, simple idea. But today in Texas, different utilities are on different old school private LTE, private narrowband communications. And they can't interoperate to talk to each other. So when they're dealing with mutual aid situations like in Houston today, unfortunately, they're having to get paper manifests to figure out how they help each other and roll back to a parking lot to communicate in person versus having real time broadband communications to be able to be more efficient and therefore be more resilient as utility to bring services back to protect, at the end of the day, their consumers. So let me pause there.
I don't know, Chris, if you want to add anything to your seat?
Yes. Yes. Thanks, Rob. And Sean and team, thank you. The only thing I'm going to add is a reference back, Sean, to how you framed this discussion.
Rob, Tim, Natasha and I and the rest of the team at Antares, we see ourselves sitting at the absolute intersection of what you framed. Obviously, at our core, we have wireless roots, but our heart and soul is in the utility sector. And we're really focused on the new realities, as Rob referenced, for the utility sector. So, the clean energy revolution as part of the move to decarbonize the integration of distributed and oftentimes renewable energy resources. Addressing the reality, as Rob referenced, of new, more frequent, more intense weather patterns, more frequent, more advanced cyber incursions, you know, the call to electrify everything, the integration of data centers, you know, integrating again artificial intelligence, not just for society as a whole, but for utilities specifically.
And you can go on and on machine learning, cloud and edge computing, all of those really are going to reside on a broadband communications capability. And what we're doing for the first time is providing utilities with a wireless component to that, a private secure wireless broadband component that allows them to take the intelligence out to the edge so that they can communicate that information back and then act upon it. So, you know, we really do see ourselves and our company at the epicenter of that new evolution. And we've created an ecosystem of 115 really cutting edge companies, many of them, you know, a bunch of them you cover, and also a community, as Rob referenced, of senior level utility advisors who are helping us really get a sense of what their needs are. But it's all focused on that intersection of secure, advanced private wireless communications, combined with really advanced evolution of the utility grid.
Okay. That's great. I guess, like to start to kind of level set everyone, can you maybe give us a little bit of the background in terms of Enterix's ability to acquire the 900 megahertz spectrum that it has and then sort of the evolution of the decision to then go target utility customers and kind of critical rulings around the FCC that has carved that opportunity out for you as a company?
Sure, absolutely, Sean. It's a great question and really to fast forward our long history and it's really it's a great time to be talking to energy investors because we did start, as you mentioned, almost a decade ago, believe it or not, with an idea in which we acquired this spectrum. It was owned by Sprint. It's actually spectrum that we had put together at Nextel and Nextel was bought by Sprint. It was being underutilized, narrowband channels that means you could only use it for sort of legacy 2 way radio like uses.
We went to the FCC in a process that took a long time. And this is really what I think of one of the many core competencies of what we have, the FCC, the regulatory, the inside the beltway issues of understanding how to take underutilized communications assets and spectrum specifically take them through this regulatory car wash, if you can call it that, to get an FCC ruling. And that was about 4 years ago, May of 2000, when we got our final report in order. And we'll talk about kind of the growing groundswell from utilities that supported that, that really drove the launch of our understanding in the demand side for us to commit to the utility space. This is spectrum that can be utilized for any purpose per the FCC licenses.
It could go into Verizon's network. It could go into a global satellite network. But we chose as we looked at it, when we looked at all the demands that are happening, right, the idea of private broadband networks was a very nascent concept, but something that we saw that there was going to be continued growth of industrial demand. From an external background, we served a lot of those industrial sectors and we spent a lot of time understanding the difference between each of them and the demand side, both who had the need for it the most and importantly, obviously, who had the ability to pay for the market value of the spectrum. Spectrum is very much like real estate.
You know, there's it exists throughout the nation. The value of it varies just like an acre of land in New York City versus in Dubuque. And so the aspect of the history and pricing value of this was something we understood well. The first value equation for Antares was taking it through this FCC process to convert it from being used for narrowband and allow us to work to be used for broadband and that was an important value capture for us. But upon the heels of that 4 years ago, we set out then to drive relationships with utilities, Amarin being our first, the pioneer that stepped forward to understand the essential need.
And Amarin had remarkably over 20 different disparate wireless networks when they did the assessment. They literally used to call it their spaghetti chart because when you look at the layout of all these things through Illinois and Missouri that they were doing, each time they had a problem, they put out a new wireless system to solve it. So they had an AMI system, they had a 2 way radio system, they had a SCADA system. You just keep layering these on top of each other. The cost justification of moving forward for them alone was just on the reduction of all of the OpEx and importantly, removal of these legacy networks that are going to migrate onto their broadband network that will now be secure, right?
Cybersecurity, as you know well, is a growing issue for these utilities. And both the risks and costs of some of the cybersecurity incursions that have already happened, we heard about those in this FBI testimony recently in Congress. There's many more that have happened that we haven't publicly heard about. But what we're seeing as a demand side, that's a big part of what's growing for the need for the spectrum. And so we own the spectrum nationwide in the full U.
S. And all the territories. And our objective is to continue to monetize the spectrum. As I mentioned earlier, we have done so on about $375,000,000 We have probably over $3,000,000,000 of continued pipeline opportunity on this spectrum asset to give you an idea of the magnitude of the asset on our balance sheet. And that asset can be valued based on prior transactions.
For those who aren't familiar with Spectrum, the FCC has held auctions for Spectrum in the past. There have been a number of private transactions that are publicly available as information. So when we have these discussions about spectrum value with utilities, there are bookends as we think of it with market values and that's how we drive to fair market value to conclude these kinds of transactions. So importantly, we're just looking forward, we also now have a filing at the FCC, which we've had broad support from utilities and the industry, for expanding our spectrum band. We currently have 6 Megahertz, we call it 3x3 because there's 3 send through receive, but that's 6 megahertz we have an application in now to expand to 10 megahertz, which is the full band around which we've been set in with our 6 megahertz.
And so the good news is that we've seen tremendous support, utilities, industry associations, vendors, because now that we have this broad ecosystem, as Chris cited, and we have customers current and prospective, they all want to see an expansion strategy. And importantly, just to transition that, it really defines the role that Enterix is playing. This isn't about being a transaction company where we bought a spectrum for this price and we're flipping it for that price. This is about the nationwide network that we're building, the foundation of which is the spectrum, but upon that we're then building important things where InterX continues to keep this capability evergreen. I've lived through the wireless revolution since the early 90s.
We used to just make phone calls, then we may add a text messaging. Now we're doing so many things that are just application layers being added. Our job is to bring this ecosystem together to solve the critical issues of utilities. And Chris cited, we have this utility strategic advisory board, one of my favorite meetings that we have all year round, which is when we bring together C level leaders across our existing customers and importantly some prospective customers to talk about the challenges and importantly some prospective customers to talk about the challenges in the way that they want to drive the usage of private LTE. So it's not us dreaming in an R and D center about wouldn't it be great if we could find customers to do something.
They're telling us, you know, we must have better mutual aid capabilities. We need to manage the borders between these utilities. We need better cybersecurity applications. And those were connecting up directly with our ecosystem program where we have those over 100 and and 15 companies. We have a separate and within it cybersecurity collective as an example with 8 companies that are just driving incremental cyber capabilities for this kind of private LTE network.
LTE as a technology, this is the standardized global technology that all of your phones use, what every carrier around the world uses. So we're now following the innovation curve of the global cellular market, which is a huge advantage versus the a lot of the legacy systems utilities had that were one off technologies, many of which honestly hit dead ends. And so migrating instead to something that's a standardized broadband pipe and now it's about integrating valuable applications into that pipe. That's what we're focused on for utilization of the spectrum.
Okay. And you sort of touched on it with Amarin but was, just hoping you could maybe explain or go into a little bit more depth around like the current environment. So if you're a utility today, what what might you currently be using? You know, what are some limitations like that? Is it only, you know, you're only receiving data back?
You're not able to send data? Or, and then what other options are available to them? Is it, in the public space, what are their options? And then are there any other private providers of networks out there?
Sure. Sure. I'll start it and I think I did start to talk about some of the Amarin situation with their legacy. But to talk more broadly, the existing systems and utilities have been very innovative. They're really some of the first industrial users to adopt the use of private networks.
So this is not a new idea for utilities to use private networks. This is an evolution of the private networks they've operated for decades and for so many different things. But historically, those were individual networks for single use cases. And that was the approach. You needed to put out a new meter system.
You went and put a rate case forward from AMI 1.0 for smart meters and you put out a mesh communications network to support really reading meters for billing, right? Now those systems have been pushed further as far as they can go with what really is a trickle of data that comes out of those meters. It's amazing what data has been utilized that data has been utilized for to try and do some analytics and decisioning. But the majority of the important assets in the network don't have connectivity, right? In a lot of places a tree falls on a line and that line falls, they only know that occurred when the neighbors call on their cell phones and then the truck rolls around the neighborhood looking for where that line was broken.
In the communications world that we lived in, having built a nationwide network, we can see every asset everywhere from the centralized cell towers out to the devices in your hands. And if any of those points fail, we know instantly and you can deal with repairing that. And so that's the resiliency that utilities need, especially in this rapidly changing environment. So what happens is really it's a pervasive deployment of low cost standardized sensors. And those could be on transformers to do predictive analytics.
Those could be thermal cameras in substations. Those can be controllers that can eventually be flying drones to be able to do things for safety to take some of the human element out of the riskiest parts of the network. And so these are all applications. Just like on your phone, you continue to download new applications to do new interesting and valuable things, We're working with this ecosystem to drive this breadth of capabilities into it that some of them are improvements of current systems, but a lot of it is actually new access to things that weren't previously available. Amarin was deploying the thousands of new reclosers and telerupters.
And they couldn't get to communicate to these things. So they were manually being operated in places, rolling trucks to be able to deal with outages. And instead now if you have this particular band that we own, 900 megahertz, it's called low band. It has really comes from the best physics of any spectrum available. And what that means is that with a single cell site you get the broadest coverage.
So there's a cost economics of that. You put an antenna on a high tower and you can reach for miles with that. And that says that every asset within that area can have a low cost monitor to understand exactly how it's operating. And as we go into a data intensive AI world, the ability to be able to collect all that data and use it across the lines of different systems, right? Historically, we had AMI billing information in one database, we had SCADA information somewhere else, we have the 2 way radio system communicating.
When we can put all that data into a pool and can be assured that it's high quality and be assured that it's secure, the ability to do analytics and decision making on that is very valuable. And that's kind of the ultimate opportunity for us to drive with the systems.
Okay. And so again, like just to kind of touch base though in terms of today like who are you competing against when you go to sell to utility today? Is it a larger public network provider? Or just kind of frame that up for me if you can.
Take it 2 ways. Honestly, our biggest challenge in getting utilities to yes is just change decision making. And you're seeing this across the companies that you provide research on across the sector that these are entities that were built to really protect the system exactly as it was for as long as possible. Now suddenly there are such demand drivers that are rapidly changing the way in which it's happening. And so the decision making is and I talk internally about our biggest competitor is inaction.
And so the good news is I think we've really turned the corner. The realization today that utilities must put out broadband communications networks, private secure for so many cases. And we have utility CEOs, we have industry leaders talking from the podiums at many of the national events from EEI, DistribuTECH about the essential nature of those who have committed and why this has to happen. We've got to have an EPRI paper that's been published recently talking about this. And so I'm focusing on that, Sean, because I want you to realize from a competitive standpoint, that's the piece that we see as the biggest challenge is impacting the change.
That being said, from a competitive standpoint, absolutely the carriers have a valuable business providing services. Public carrier services are very different. It's kind of the old Ford comment of any color you want as long as it's black. The idea here is that this is a bespoke system that is private. And private means a lot in a security standpoint, private means a lot in a control situation for the utilities to have full control of it.
And it means a lot for them in a financial return standpoint because this is a system they're investing in and capitalizing in. And so private alone is really a big part of the justification. They deploy it where they want it, how they want it. Remember, they've got assets as you know in places where there isn't wireless coverage. So while there are alternatives and there's other spectrum bands, none that are focused and dedicated just to this use or that are in this beachfront property space where we are.
We haven't seen that the competitive threat to date has been pretty light. It's really been about how do we drive and help utilities collectively drive forward in moving into this 900 megahertz ecosystem.
Okay. And can we talk about the go to market strategy? Obviously, this has been kind of a longer process for you all from Amarin, but it seems to be accelerating more recently. But just kind of the process of selling to utilities and then some of the things you've done around standing up an association to help kind of move the conversations forward. And then also the ecosystem.
You know, I guess the thought process would be, you know, sometimes utilities tend to move rather slowly or things are changing more quickly than they can appreciate and adopt. So, you know, what are you doing to kind of move that conversation forward and and how does that look for you all today?
Hey, Rob, why don't I start on that one and then hand it back to you and to Tim. But, Sean, as Rob referenced, we specifically obviously chose the utility sector and we realized when we did that, that we were going to really have to build the marketplace. So as you referenced, Sean, we actually created a trade association, Utility Broadband Alliance, and we founded it, we stood it up, we helped to finance it, and then a couple of years ago, we actually set it free and it went back to be independently run by the utilities. We also created the ecosystem. All of this was designed so that what we were doing at Antares was much more than just a spectrum offering.
We were helping to address needs of utilities and we were providing a solution set. And so we look at it that way. We look at it more like, yes, it's going to take a utility sort of a while to get through a large capital intensive project like integrating, standing up and deploying private LTE. But what we try to do is give them that justification. A core element of it is, as Rob referenced, the ability to capitalize, capitalize the spectrum, capitalize and obviously also put into the rate base, the spectrum, the infrastructure and other components of the build, but it's also to really justify both internally to the leadership of the utility, but also to policymakers the absolute value of this investment.
And that takes some time, but we are confident that we're obviously on the right pace with 7 utilities across 15 states. When you combine the deployment of those 7 utilities, they are much larger than any sort of non nationwide wireless carrier. So we are finally getting really significant scale across those 7 utilities. And as Rob had referenced, our goal is to really develop and deploy a network of networks. So integrating ultimately these utilities, having 80% of the counties in Texas gives you a good visual description of that.
But that's our goal. Yes, obviously it takes some time, but it is extremely valuable for Antares, for our shareholders, for our customers, for our ecosystem members. And we see it as the right approach and then we see scale benefits beyond that, as Rob referenced, from a collection and aggregation and action upon data, but also driving scale and scope in everything from tower access and equipment access, but also research and development. So yes, definitely it takes time. These are big contracts.
These are big investments. And so we recognize that it takes some time. We're set up, as Rob referenced, 0 debt, very nimble company, getting close to 100 employees, but we're set up to really tackle this unlike any other product service in the wireless space and the utility space that I'm aware of.
And I think, Chris, the one other thing that's important to note is the size of our pipeline. We've got 60 utilities in that pipeline with a value that's in excess of $3,000,000,000 So our sales force is focused on driving those utilities that are within our pipeline that roughly represent 90% of the value of what we think our spectrum is worth to get through their process. They bring resources to bear to help the teams that are working in each one of these utilities on their path forward on building out a wireless network. That being said, the other part of our sales force, quite frankly, that's almost more valuable than our own internal resources is the customers that we've already signed. When they're out there sharing information, as you know, they talk to each other, they go to all the same conferences and the successes that our customers are now having by deploying these networks and putting use cases to work is they're talking to each other.
So other utilities are learning from their brethren about what's working well for each one of them and what a great partner Antares is and making that all come together. So that's the focus of our real sales effort is moving that, continuing to move those processes along because these are very complex projects for these utilities that do take time. And so we want to support that as much as possible.
Okay. And that's a good segue. So you brought up the pipeline, the 3,000,000,000 plus in pipeline. There's a couple good slides in your presentation in terms of how you break down pipeline and the critical pieces like where they fall in the funnel. But maybe we could just spend a few minutes discussing that in terms of, you know, how you move customers through the pipeline.
And, again, just, you know, the size of the pipeline and and what you think that represents relative to maybe the total market opportunity that's out there? Like is that is your pipeline still small relative to the total that could be out there? Or is that a significant piece of what's available in the U. S?
Sure. Let me start on that. So we talk about our pipeline in 2 ways. 1 is the phases of the customers, kind of a traditional sales funnel aspect that we disclose on a quarterly basis kind of updates on that to give a perspective. As Chris referenced, these are large and time intensive transactions.
Sales cycles are long. You're well familiar with that from other companies, I'm sure that you cover. But with that, we've created really another way to look at it. We call that demonstrate intent. That's a series of 20 measurements that measure things in which utilities have done that we believe have begun to demonstrate their intent that they are planning to move forward with a private LTE opportunity.
In combination when you have enough of those. And we have a top echelon and our highest demonstrated intent scores because it's a quantitative weighted twenty factors that we add up. We have about $1,000,000,000 in that top category. It's something we measure and report on. We actually use it as an internal system we use for our own sales measurement and incentives that we decided to start publishing because it's challenging when you have a lumpy business like ours.
You get 9 figure deals like Encore that we just announced in. There can be a period of time between that and the next transaction. That's the nature of it. But every day, we're seeing measured progress through these ways in which utilities are demonstrating intent. And that could be standing up on a podium in one of those events like I talked about, someone who's not yet a customer but is talking about their intention to move into private LTE.
It could be the level of conversations that we're having and getting into contract discussions with them. And so there's a whole series of things, some that are public, some that are private that we use to measure that. But I think overall from a pipeline standpoint, we talk about that our pipeline is in the $3,000,000,000 range currently. And so you can segment that into the demonstrated intent categories, we can segment to those that are moving down through the funnel. But the total addressable market for us for spectrum monetization importantly is that on top of that, which is important and we're putting more and more effort into this, as customers are starting to build their networks and are starting to just like when you bought your iPhone and you had 3 applications and now you look at your phone and you have pages of applications, they're starting to have greater needs.
And so I think you asked a question earlier about the ways in which these customers, what's driving them to yes. Often it's a very specific need that can't be addressed otherwise. And so take an example of San Diego Gas and Electric, right, one of our important customers, as you know, a Sempra company, as well as Encore, our most recent customer. San Diego separately made their own decision based on the need for a very low latency, very fast speed communications network to prevent wildfires, wildfire mitigation. They have a program that they call Falling Conductor, which basically says if something happens to a line and it breaks in a storm or in some bad situation because vegetation or otherwise, there's about 1.4 seconds before that broken line hits the ground.
In that timeframe, they want to be able to depower that segment. And they've effectively developed a technology with Schweitzer Engineering Labs that does just that. They put sensors on the line, They can measure the current that it stops flowing. And they can turn off that power and prevent it from being a live line by the time in that one point second, 0.4 seconds before it hits the ground. That's wildfire prevention and importantly different than detection.
There's a lot of good technology that have cameras and things to see when fires have started. This is about stopping a fire before it has a risk of even beginning. You can imagine the value of that use case if you stop a single wildfire. And so that was the pinnacle of their needs. But very quickly as they went down the process to find this communications network to enable this kind of use case, because in the traditional world it was you have one use case, you build a communication system just for that use case, they said, well, we've got all this new distributed energy.
We've got battery storage. We've got wind, solar, other things. Can we connect those assets in a cheaper, faster way? And they are. So they've got battery storage connected.
They're using it to have greater intelligence of at any given time where power is being generated in this new distributed energy world and where it's being consumed importantly. And we're going to see greater penetration of communication sensors into meters. And we're having a growing groundswell from our customers current and future about can we use these broadband networks now to serve the AMI 2.0 equation as well. And so architectures are being developed. We're having leading vendors like Itron that have announced the line of meters that work that are Antares active, that work on our Antares networks.
We just came from the EEI event just a few weeks ago, their annual convention in Las Vegas. NVIDIA's CEO spoke there. And the following morning, we had meetings with them and some other leading technology companies about how do we get this level of compute power, NVIDIA chips, to the edge? Their vision, they've invested in companies to try and drive an NVIDIA chip into the meter. It's not even appropriate to call it a meter.
It will be an edge compute box that will have metering as an application, but will do so many more important things both in front of and behind that meter with that compute power. The realization of NVIDIA and others is you can't do that without a broadband connectivity path. You can't put that level of compute capability without connectivity to be able to see and control and decision off that data that's being happening at the edge. So those are the kind of current and future use cases that we're seeing driving demand and driving our customers through this large scale pipeline. The number of use cases just continues to grow, just as a last point on it, right.
We started Ameren had 14 different use cases when they as their first customer and they justify, we now have lists of dozens of use cases that utilities are currently using and even more that our ecosystem vendors are driving. So again, just like that LTE phone that we all carry, every time you add an application, there's very low marginal cost. It's greater return on this investment in networks, the spectrum of which is a minority of the cost of building it, but an essential piece of unlocking that value.
Okay. And in terms of the contracts that you're signing, like general terms, like durations, escalators, what's the right way to think about sort of like what the average contract is gonna look like with customers in terms of duration and the ability to reprice that in the future? Like, what's the pricing mechanism? Is it based off of megahertz pop nationally or something? Like, how do you how do you think about that?
So great question. So megahertz pop is kind of the back of the envelope for those who aren't familiar with. We take the total megahertz you have, in our case, 6 megahertz and the population and kind of divide 1 by the other. You get kind of a back of the envelope ratio to say this is about what spectrum could be worth in that particular county. That's important.
Our licenses are by county. And so we customize the footprint to utilities footprint. And that's an important value that they get from work with Enterix. Cristiano, do you want to elaborate on that one a little further?
Yes. And I'd probably throw it to Tim as well. I mean, the fact of the matter is, and we've said this, what we see is, we price our contracts at what we call fair market value. It is kind of the sort of down the fairway between 2 of the more recent auctions. The goal is and we don't really focus on price per megahertz pop, although, Sean, we do know that a lot of folks sort of measure us by that, but that's not really specifically how we look at it.
We want to make sure at the end of this that there's really fair market value for Antares and our shareholders and also a really a fair market value for our customers because as Rob referenced, the leases are 20 or 30 years often with extensions beyond that. And even with the sales, the sales contracts that we've had, we want a long term relationship with these utilities. Everything we're doing is designed to create a long term relationship with our customers. And so the goal isn't to scratch out every dime on the front end, right? It's really designed to have something that is absolutely fair market value, absolutely beneficial to our shareholders, but also absolutely beneficial to our utility customers and then creates an opportunity for us, as Rob referenced, to be able to provide products and services as we go forward to the extent that those are needed.
Tim, anything else?
No, I'll just say, we have done 7 transactions to date. 4 of them have been leases that range from 20 to 30 years. Each one of those has multiple renewal periods built on to the end of it. That's not included in the amount that we announced when we announced the contract value. So there is additional upside to that value when we hit that time period.
And also keep in mind that on those long term leases, we're getting paid upfront. So we're getting paid in the 1st several years of that deal, even though it is a 20 to 30 year transaction. So for us, it's very much a cash flow story and being able to bring those proceeds in earlier, as Rob mentioned earlier, we've signed about $375,000,000 in deals. We've already roughly collected half of that and still with another $186,000,000 to be collected from deals that we've already signed. So from a cash flow standpoint and a cash flow story, we're in very good shape.
Okay. And I do want to come back to that, to the financials in a second. But like in terms of the ability to sign a deal, bringing cash today or 3 years from now, but that's a 20 year lease. Right? I guess looking ahead, how do you see Antares driving revenues from that lease in the like the selling of additional products and services, but those are those related to the ecosystem and kind of carving out fee based revenue off of customers using ecosystem partners?
Or how do you think about that in the future?
Yes, precisely right. So the leases themselves, 20, 30 years, typically 10 year renewals, multiple 10 year renewals on top of that. So the residual value is there. And then obviously, the geographic expansion of the rest of our spectrum. I kind of talk about it as kind of vertical expansion.
If you think the spectrum is a horizontal expansion, the vertical is getting into services and products. And we're really being pulled into this both because of the way we put up the ecosystem initially to demonstrate the valuable use cases, but we're being asked by utilities to continue to offer them capabilities to kind of fill in the white spaces, help add value to these devices. If you just think simply about we're visiting utilities and they're out doing the exact same assessment and testing of which device do I hang on a pole, what's the best way to negotiate a lease for a commercial tower for me to hang something on there, how do I get a lower cost communications module that includes these needs. These are all examples of things that we're working with our partners, importantly, our ecosystem partners, to develop better capabilities. We're really using the scale and scope of the nationwide utility network.
And we're used to being a nationwide wireless carrier. Utilities, while they're big footprints, they're pretty tiny when it comes to the scale of purchasing that they could do individually from any of these key vendors. SIM cards, the very simple idea of a SIM card, that's something that you're dealing with a couple of companies around the globe that do that in such scale with existing carriers that they can't even return the phone calls to individual utilities sometimes. And so we're bringing that scale and scope. I see it as adding value 3 ways.
1st to the customer that offers a better value equation for them than if they were to go out on their own to try and do it. The second is to the vendors in our ecosystem, to our partners, that we're becoming a channel for them to have access to all these current and future customers. And it makes their process more efficient. And lastly and importantly is capturing value for our shareholders as well. So those are kind of the 3 legs of the stool of the product expansion, which we honestly have a long list of areas that we're focused on.
We're going to continue to be talking more about that. We're not yet at the point where we want to put out kind of the scale of the dollars of what it is, but we're wildly excited about that as an expansion area for us and we're putting a lot of time and effort into driving it. Last point of that is it's relatively capital non intensive, doesn't require a lot of capital in the kind of examples that I gave you. A lot of our existing resources are driving those things out of our ecosystem. Clearly, we have an ability to continue to drive it and grow larger if we see bigger opportunities in return for our shareholders.
You have a pretty high bar on the kind of business model we have today that Tim described. And we signed a lease. The vast majority of that flows through the bottom line because the cost structure that we have in place, it's cash flow, it's a cash flow story for us. So revenue is not that different than cash flow at the end of the day, minus our OpEx. So it's a pretty clean and simple model to understand today and we'll only go into things where we know that are going to either add value in those three ways I talked about or that are essential to help continue to drive spectrum acquisition.
Okay. That's great. And then also just to kind of frame this up, like, the the lease for a customer, like, the lease cost relative to the total cost of moving to a private network, like, you're you're a portion of the spend. Right? But can you frame up what portion of the spend you are?
Yeah. So from a network build out, we're roughly 10% to 30% of the total cost of that network build out. That's going to depend on the value of the spectrum, as well as their geographic size, how many cell sites they need to put up and that type of thing. So that's going to drive that kind of overall cost pool. So, for example, you may have $1,000,000,000 network build out of which the spectrum cost is somewhere between $75,000,000 $125,000,000 a very relatively small portion of the overall cost that the utility is going to see, which is one of the reasons why these projects take time to move through their internal processes is because they're such very large projects and it's not just that spectrum lease that is getting approved within the utilities.
The other thing strategically what Tim is saying is that because spectrum is the unlocking piece of the puzzle, you can't build these networks unless you have access to spectrum. It puts us on the front end of the thinking of these utilities. And once the transactions are done like Encore, it puts us on their side of the table to help them as a partner with their economics locked in to be able to figure out how to build value out of these networks for the next multiple decades. So that's a it's a great position to be in for us to be able to drive this continued expansion of value for the customer and value for our shareholders.
And so like today, when you those are professional services you're providing to the utilities, are you billing extra for that or that's just part of the lease agreement today, like when you're doing the consulting on the front end?
Indeed, we've included it. And really it's been part of the learning process to we're using it as a way to help better understand the customer, the customer's needs so that as we develop these incremental products that we're filling a pent up demand, they're asking us for those things. And so we're at the table identifying where the white spaces, where the gaps are, where the needs are and we're best positioned to be able to help bring forward using our ecosystem partners, the solutions.
Okay. And then turning to financials kind of for the last few minutes. Obviously, it's a cash upfront story. So, like, generally speaking, like, you know, you received cash year 1 year 3, or can you frame that up for us, how you're structuring the contracts? And then, you know, kind of what minimal, you know, your cash obligations as a company are on an annual basis, like how you're managing expenses moving forward?
Sure. Yeah. So a couple of things there. So on a on a typical lease, we'll see within the 1st 3 to 4 years of that lease, we'll see all of the payments come in from that customer. So that enables us to be that cash flow story that I talked about.
So last year, in our fiscal year that ended in March of 'twenty four, we collected over $106,000,000 from our customers, which enabled us to have over $50,000,000 of free cash flow, of which we turned around and then spent $24,000,000 buying back shares of our stock. Our Board was enabled us to put forward a new share repurchase program in September of last year for $250,000,000 based on the confidence of us being able to continue to deliver cash flow and then return it to our shareholders via that program. So, what then happens is from a GAAP perspective, when you think about how it flows through from a revenue perspective, on those leases, that revenue is going to be amortized over the life of the lease. So, 20 to 30 years, you're going to see that pro rata recognition from a revenue perspective. Of course, that's very different than what the cash flow profile is.
Secondly, we've also done some sales. Those sales transactions are not going to flow through the revenue line item, but they're going to flow through as a gain when the spectrum gets delivered. We're still getting payments very quickly on this Encore transaction that we just did, you know, $102,500,000 We're getting all of those proceeds within 2 years of signing that transaction. So, we're going to get that money very quickly. But once we do deliver all that spectrum, that will go through it as a gain on the P and L.
So, it won't flow through the recurring revenue line item over a like we would do for a lease. So there's a little bit of a difference on how some of those things flow through. So at the end of the day, it's less about GAAP revenue quite frankly than it is about the cash flow that we continue to drive. From a spend perspective, to follow-up on your the second piece of your question there, we run somewhere roughly $40,000,000 to $45,000,000 in OpEx each year to support the organization and to continue to monetize the spectrum asset that we have. And then we've also got another kind of what we call our internal CapEx, which is the cost to clear the spectrum to move incumbents out of the 3x3 as the FCC allocated it in that 2020 report in order to move them out of the band so that we can have a free and clear 3x3 to provide to the customers.
That cost is borne by Antares. We've estimated we'd spend in 2020, so the life of being able to clear all those customers, about $120,000,000 to $150,000,000 We're on time. We're on track with what we've been able to do there. We've cleared roughly 70% of the customers within the band, and it's gone really well according to plan. That spend as we move forward is going to start to drop off.
You know, we've spent anywhere on an annualized basis from say 15 to almost $30,000,000 That's really driven by customers and where we can clear customer, clear those incumbents in advance. But we're going to see that spend over the next couple of years start to drop off significantly. And so really it'll just be that ongoing OpEx.
Okay. And like how much of the the OpEx spend is related to the the kind of sales process of this? Like, you know, at some this is a much longer conversation, but at at like some point, you'll sort of like reach penetration. Right? And so then do you, like, how do you you have brought in cash, so then how do you manage, you know, the tail?
Qualitative answer, then Tim can get into the quantified one, right. So we run a pretty lean and mean sales team, if I could say that. Our team on average probably has 15, 20 years plus of experience of selling communication solutions, AMI and other things into utilities. So it's as you said, it's a very long sales cycle, but this is relationship selling. And importantly, we're not selling widgets, we're really driving relationship building through all of the we've talked about kind of our top down and bottom up strategy or top down about the work that we're doing, helping utilities everywhere from the FCC to the DOE to literally in the legislation that came out for federal funding.
We're driving language to support capital availability for broadband. And so when you talk about sales, we're not an ordinary kind of driving broadband for the nation's energy structure. One thing worth saying, and I'm going to say our newest salesperson facetiously, we're honored to have, in January we announced a new board member joining as our Vice Chairman, Tom Keown, who's the former Chair, I'm sure you're aware, the CEO of Edison Electric Institute after more than a 3 decade career there. Tom is now, to me it's a sign of where we are as a company that he joined us as much as he likes us really because as he said, Tom could have been on the board of any company in the world, probably any Fortune 50 company. But instead as he says regularly, the need for what we're doing to solve so many of the challenges that as he sat in the seat of EEI, that's what we're driving.
And so when I joke about a salesperson, but the idea is that we know from all the way at the highest levels of government and leadership at utilities, all the way down to the trenches of those who are deploying and managing the communications networks, it takes that broad of an effort to move a utility from understanding private LTE to making decision to move forward. And so we've got a very broad strategy on how we do that. So long answer, but we see ourselves all as part of that process to be frank. And so Tim, do you have any financial perspective? Yes.
Well, the only thing I'm going to add to that is when you look at our organization, our spend really is going to be like a bell curve from us on the Spectrum Leasing business where as we get more and more penetration, we'll be able to peel some costs out of the organization. We're still relatively early in our life cycle with plenty of spectrum left to monetize. But hopefully as we move down that and through that process, we'll need less resources to be able to get further and further down the up the penetration curve.
Okay. Yeah. That's kind of what I was asking. Like, I assume, like, as you reach penetration, you start to manage more for cash. And then just, like, how do you prioritize, like, obviously, you have the buyback in place, but, like, why the buyback versus, like, a special dividend or something else?
Like what's the kind of rationale there from the company?
Yeah. We continue to look at all different ways to return that cash flow that I've talked about back to our shareholders. So a lot of time talking about it with our board. We feel like right now with where we are and quite frankly where the stock price is and market capitalization is, best way for us to return that capital is to buy back shares of our stock. And so we've been very active doing that.
Again, as I mentioned earlier, we put a $250,000,000 program in place in September, really built on the confidence of continuing to drive customer signings and cash flows. And that's going to be our number one priority to return that cash. That's not saying a dividend or special dividend or those types of things are off the table, but it's just today when we look at it, that's the best use of the way to handle that excess cash flow.
And Tim, we've why don't you give the right numbers? I mean, we've brought back more than a 1,000,000 shares out of 19,000,000, is that right? So we're
Yes, that's roughly right, Chris. And last year, we spent about $24,000,000 We spent almost 50,000,000 since we started buying back shares. So, we continue to be very active on a quarterly basis.
Okay. Yeah, I mean, we're kind of coming up on the hour. So I mean, Rob, I'd hand it back to you for some closing remarks. This has been really helpful from our perspective. I think it's kind of a newer story to most of our clients, you know, are are looking at, again, we talked about it early on, but are looking at the grid and companies to play the grid.
And I I just think this is pretty interesting, you know, lean balance sheet, big TAM, buyback in place. So, but I'll turn it over to you, Rob, for closing comments. And just thank you to the team for joining the call.
Thank you, Sean, and to the Jenny team for hosting us. I think you started on kind of talking about who we are. I want to maybe I'll end up the same thing that what we're really focused on is solving what we now understand is to be a very critical need. We're now seeing the inflection point of having this critical mass of 7 utilities in 15 states, pretty significant contracted proceeds still to be collected from these important customers. But most exciting to us is what's ahead of us.
It's the expansion strategy geographically, vertically into new products and services and being able to drive this really important and valuable network into our nation's electric grid. Tasha Vecarelli, who's on our Head of IR, is happy to I know we didn't get to Q and A. We love talking to investors, especially honestly energy investors because as we've evolved from a telecom company to what we think now is an important energy story, we really want to talk to more folks in the energy space about what it is that we're doing. So invite you to contact us and we can follow-up with any questions. Obviously, contact Sean and Sean can help you get in touch with us.
Great. Thank you, Rob. And thank you everyone else for being on today. We appreciate it. And everyone have a good afternoon.
Thanks, Sean. Thank you.