Welcome to Uniti Group's third quarter 2022 conference call. My name is Gigi, and I'll be your operator for today. A webcast of this call will be available on the company's website, www.uniti.com, beginning today and will remain available for 14 days. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Participants on the call will have the opportunity to ask questions following the company's prepared comments. Forward-looking statement disclaimer. The company would like to remind you that today's remarks include forward-looking statements, and actual results could differ materially from those projected in these statements. The factors that could cause actual results to differ are discussed in the company's filings with the SEC. The company's remarks this morning will reference slides posted on its website, and you are encouraged to refer to those materials during this call.
Discussions during the call will also include certain financial measures that were not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in the company's current report on Form 8-K, dated today. I would now like to turn the call over to Uniti Group's Chief Executive Officer, Kenny Gunderman. Please go ahead, Mr. Gunderman.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Starting on Slide 3, our results for the third quarter were once again strong as demand for our mission-critical fiber infrastructure continues to grow. We achieved our sixth consecutive quarter of elevated new sales bookings, which we now consider the new norm. As importantly, we also had another strong quarter of gross install activity with a mean time to deliver of less than 100 days. Consistent bookings balanced between anchor and lease-up, along with installs that can be turned up quickly in our industry-leading monthly churn of 0.2%, demonstrate that our strategy is sound and that we're executing on it well. To reiterate, our strategy continues to focus on buying and building mission-critical fiber infrastructure and then leasing infrastructure to anchor customers in the 5%-10% cash yield range and additional lease-up customers, driving cumulative cash yields above 10%.
This strategy has resulted in Uniti becoming the second-largest independent fiber operator in the country, with 134,000 route miles and a long runway for profitable growth. Slide 4 demonstrates, Uniti continues to track well on these shared infrastructure economics. We're building new fiber largely for our wireless customers and then successfully adding additional tenants with very high margins and minimal CapEx, resulting in a cumulative cash flow yield today of 22%, a more than threefold increase from the anchor yield on these projects. Slide 5 illustrates that the majority of new bookings continue to be lease up in nature, and along with our intentional focus of balancing wholesale, non-wholesale, and anchor lease-up opportunities, has resulted in outsized margin enhancement, AFFO growth, and a business that remains relatively immune to swings in the economy.
Turning to Slide 6, high-capacity long-haul routes are needed by all of our customers, including wireless carriers, hyperscalers, international carriers, MSOs, and large enterprises, to connect their disparate markets, data centers, and POPs. Today, dark fiber in North America is an approximately $1.5 billion annual market opportunity and is expected to grow about 10% annually over the next several years. A growing component of our wholesale strategy is wavelength services, which represent a $2 billion annual revenue opportunity today in North America and is expected to grow approximately 7% over the next several years. We're selectively lighting more long-haul routes to provide wave services and capitalize on growing demand while maintaining the same discipline on anchor and lease-up economics. For example, we recently announced two new long-haul routes that will offer wavelength services and multiple terabit spectrum services to key markets in our southeast footprint.
This is in addition to our previously announced Miami to Tampa route. The anchor cash yields are approximately 10%, and we have a clear line of sight to a combined cash yield of low- to mid-teens once leased up over the next few years. Having an owned national network is a meaningful competitive advantage for Uniti, especially given that it would take billions of dollars and many years to build a new national network. We estimate there are only five truly owned national networks and two independent fiber providers with national networks in the U.S. today, with Uniti being one of them. Thus, our ability to deploy dark fiber and wave services present Uniti with a unique growth opportunity with minimal competition.
The resulting economics of our national wholesale business are very attractive, with high margin, passively managed revenue, virtually no churn, long-term contracts that routinely have escalators built into them, and minimal CapEx requirements. Before turning to our enterprise business, I'd like to comment briefly on lit wireless backhaul. Lit backhaul is a terrific way to lease up existing network or build new network with attractive yields for wireless carriers. However, the contract lengths are typically shorter than that of dark fiber, and there's some pricing pressure on reterms. As such, Uniti has always considered managing reterm risk as a strategic imperative, and we manage that risk by offsetting reterm discounts with lease-up on the networks, additional business from the wireless carriers, and upselling bandwidth.
As an example of this focus, today we're announcing that we recently reterm approximately 1,100 lit backhaul sites with one of our major wireless customers, resulting in a net price increase of approximately 20% as we upgrade these sites to 10 Gb. We're extending the contract term from a blended 2.5 years remaining to 8 years remaining. We're actively working with another of our major wireless carriers to reterm an additional 1,200 lit backhaul sites. Together, these two agreements represent over 60% of our existing lit backhaul portfolio and provide stability and increased visibility for our earnings going forward. Now, turning to Slide 7. Although enterprise sales represent less than 5% of our total revenue today and will likely always represent a minority percentage, it remains a critical element of our lease-up strategy.
Enterprise new sales, bookings, and install activity during the third quarter were, again, both very strong. We expect these trends to continue as we further capture market share in our existing and new metro markets. As a result of our consistently strong bookings activity, enterprise recurring revenue was up 16% during the quarter. Slide 8 is an example of how we're executing to increase market share in markets with existing fiber and where we're currently offering lit services. Birmingham is the largest metro area in Alabama and the 50th largest metropolitan statistical area in the U.S. It's a very attractive Tier 2 market, which we originally entered in 2017 with a large greenfield build. Today, we have an extensive fiber network there with almost 27,000 strand miles of dense fiber. Despite our growth over the years, our enterprise market share is still only approximately 5%.
Homewood is an affluent neighborhood of Birmingham, and for less than $1 million of capital, we can expand our already robust network to reach an additional 600 attractive enterprise customers. These investments not only expand our market share, but will result in very attractive economics for Uniti, resulting in cumulative cash yields of approximately 50% and IRRs of 30%. These type investments are only available to providers like Uniti with an extensive network already in place. Equally exciting, and as we've mentioned before, we own metro fiber in nearly 300 markets nationwide, which represents terrific capital and margin-efficient growth potential for enterprise, wireless backhaul, and even small cells. We only recently acquired most of these markets on our 2020 settlement with Windstream, so we're just beginning to capitalize on the opportunity.
Given the proven success of our anchor and lease-up strategies and the attractive economics of these enterprise opportunities, with payback periods of almost half the initial contract term and cash yields of 50% +, we continue to actively prioritize these metro markets for expansion in both 2023 and beyond. In looking at our national wholesale network and our 300 metro markets combined, we estimate that less than 5% of our total 8 million strand miles of fiber are actually lit. This virtual blank canvas provides us with a terrific runway for disciplined growth without the burden of legacy declining products. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Paul.
Thank you, Kenny, and good morning, everyone. We are once again pleased with how our business has performed during the quarter, with robust booking and install levels driving in-line consolidated revenue and better than expected Adjusted EBITDA. While non-recurring revenue at Uniti Fiber was lower than expected during the quarter, recurring revenue, both at Uniti Fiber and Uniti Leasing was strong. Uniti remains well-positioned to weather current macroeconomic conditions, given our robust level of long-term revenues under contract, our declining capital intensity, and the work we have done to strengthen our balance sheet and push out our debt maturities. As a result of the strengths of the quarter and our expectations for the fourth quarter, we are increasing the midpoint of our 2022 outlook for consolidated revenue and Adjusted EBITDA. Please turn to Slide 9, and I'll start with comments on our third quarter.
We reported consolidated revenues of $283 million, consolidated Adjusted EBITDA of $225 million, AFFO attributed to common shares of $112 million, and AFFO per diluted common share of $0.43. Net loss attributable to common shares for the quarter was approximately $156 million or $0.66 per diluted share, which includes a $216 million goodwill impairment charge related to our Uniti Fiber segment that was driven by an increase in the macro interest rate environment. At Uniti Leasing, we reported segment revenues of $209 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $203 million, both of which were up 5% from the prior year. Accordingly, Uniti Leasing achieved an Adjusted EBITDA margin of 97% for the quarter. Turning to Slide 10.
Our growth capital investment program continues to provide positive results for Uniti. Over the past six years, our tenant has invested approximately $1 billion of tenant capital improvements in our network. Uniti continues to invest its own capital in long-term value accretive fiber, largely focused on highly valuable last mile fiber, including fiber in commercial parks and fiber to the home. Collectively, these investments have resulted in 18,800 route miles of newly constructed fiber and 23% of the legacy copper network being overbuilt with fiber. Based on the investments made to date and our expectation that Windstream will utilize most, if not all, of the GCI program, we expect that nearly half of the legacy copper network will be overbuilt with fiber by 2030.
During the third quarter, Uniti Leasing deployed approximately $72 million towards growth capital investment initiatives, with the majority of the investments relating to the Windstream GCI program. These GCI investments added 2,250 route miles of fiber to Uniti's own network across several different markets. As of September 30th, Uniti has invested approximately $460 million of capital to date under the GCI program with Windstream, adding around 13,500 route miles and 731,000 strand miles of fiber to our network. These investments will be added to the master leases at an 8% initial yield at the one-year anniversary of Uniti making such investment. They are subject to a 0.5% annual escalator and result in nearly 100% margin.
The investments we have made to date will ultimately generate approximately $38 million of annualized cash rent and increase the overall value of our network. At Uniti Fiber, we turned over almost 300 lit backhaul dark fiber and small cell sites for our wireless carriers across our southeast footprint during the third quarter. These installs add annualized revenues of approximately $3 million. We currently have around 1,200 lit backhaul dark fiber and small cell sites remaining in our backlog that we expect to deploy over the next few years. This wireless backlog represents an incremental $11.5 million of annualized revenues. At Uniti Fiber, we reported revenues of $74 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $29 million during the third quarter.
Revenues were lower than expected due to lower non-recurring equipment sales and installs resulting from several factors, including the timing of those sales, a modest impact from delivery delays, and key employee turnover within our E-rate group. However, Adjusted EBITDA was slightly higher than expected given the low margin nature of the equipment sales, combined with lower than expected costs. Uniti Fiber net success-based CapEx was $26 million in the third quarter. We also incurred $2 million of maintenance CapEx, or about 3% of revenues. Please turn to Slide 11 and I will now cover our updated 2022 guidance. We are revising our guidance primarily for business unit level revisions and the impact of transaction-related and other costs incurred to date. Our outlook excludes future acquisitions, capital market transactions, and future transaction-related and other costs not specifically mentioned herein.
Actual results could differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Our current full year outlook for 2022 includes the following for each segment. Beginning with Uniti Leasing, based on our continued strong lease-up success, we now expect revenues and Adjusted EBITDA to be $827 million and $805 million respectively at the midpoint, representing Adjusted EBITDA margins of approximately 97%. Revenue and Adjusted EBITDA each include $14 million of cash rent associated with the GCI investments and $25 million related to the straight-line rent associated with the Windstream master leases and GCI investments. We still expect to deploy $275 million of success-based CapEx at the midpoint of our guidance, of which $250 million relates to estimated Windstream GCI investments. Turning to Slide 12.
We now expect Uniti Fiber to contribute $305 million of revenues at the midpoint, given the factors I mentioned earlier that are impacting our non-recurring revenue. However, we are increasing the midpoint of our full year recurring revenue outlook on the strong bookings and install activity we continue to see. Our full year outlook for Adjusted EBITDA remains $121 million, with a lower non-recurring revenue offset by higher recurring revenue and lower costs. When adjusting for the Everstream transaction that occurred in May 2021, the year-over-year revenue and Adjusted EBITDA growth is 5% and 8% respectively. This strong growth demonstrates our continued success in managing our cost structure and improving margins while executing on lease-up that leverages our existing dense southeast fiber footprint.
As I mentioned last quarter, we expect 2022 to be the peak year for Sprint-related churn. As a reminder, as we turn to 2023, we still expect to realize some ETL fees, but most likely $12 million-$13 million less than what we recognized in 2022. We also still expect that our core recurring revenue at Uniti Fiber will increase by a mid-single digits percentage rate for full year 2023 when compared to 2022. Net success-based CapEx for Uniti Fiber this year is expected to be $120 million at the midpoint of our guidance, a 12% decrease from levels in 2021. Turning to Slide 13.
For 2022, we still expect full-year AFFO to range between $1.70 and $1.77 per diluted common share, with a midpoint of $1.74 per diluted share, a 4% increase from 2021. On a consolidated basis, we expect revenues to be $1.1 billion and Adjusted EBITDA to be $900 million at the midpoint. Our guidance contemplates consolidated interest expense for the full year of approximately $390 million. Corporate SG&A, excluding amounts allocated to our business segments, is expected to be approximately $34 million, including $8 million of stock-based compensation expense. We still expect our weighted average diluted common shares outstanding for full-year 2022 to be around 267 million shares.
As a reminder, guidance ranges for key components of our outlook are included in the appendix to our presentation. Turning now to our capital structure. Given the current macroeconomic and interest rate environment, we will continue to be opportunistic in our approach to managing our capital structure over the near term. At quarter end, we had approximately $270 million of combined unrestricted cash and cash equivalents and undrawn revolver capacity. Our leverage ratio stood at 5.80x based on net debt to last quarter annualized Adjusted EBITDA. On November 1st, our board declared a dividend of $0.15 per share to stockholders of record on December 16th, payable December 30th. With that, I'll now turn the call back over to Kenny.
Thanks, Paul. We continue to believe that our core business will likely see little to no noticeable impact from any economic downturn given the mission-critical nature of broadband. Further, the vast majority of our revenue is wholesale in nature with long-term contracts. Lastly, 95% of our debt is fixed rate, and we have no significant near-term maturities. As it relates to potential debt refinancing and M&A, we have the ability to be patient. Our strategy since 2015 has been to acquire and build mission-critical communications infrastructure, and then lease that infrastructure to quality anchor customers with a clear path to lease up, resulting in combined cash yields of 10%+.
While in our early years, our priority was more focused on acquiring rather than building as we established our national fiber platform, we're now much more focused on building given the attractive returns we're seeing in the challenging economic and capital markets backdrop. We believe our strategy is working and the initial investments both in M&A and greenfield builds are paying off. We currently have over $7 billion of revenue under contract with an average remaining term of approximately 8 years. The majority of this revenue is passively managed in the form of triple net or dark fiber MLAs. As a result, the operating costs associated with this revenue is very predictable, which results in a cash flow-rich business over the mid to long term.
By 2030, we expect to have generated approximately $1.5 billion of cumulative free cash flow if we maintain our current dividend at an approximate level of annual capital investment. This trajectory leads to substantial deleveraging, resulting in 2.5x-3.5 x net leverage and more than doubling the size of our fiber business. Our network is highly underutilized, presenting profitable growth potential for some time. We expect net capital intensity to decline from our current level of approximately 35% to 5%-10% by 2030, and is indicative of accelerating operating leverage in the business and many years of high margin and high yielding lease up, including dark fiber, lighting unique long-haul routes, and expanding deeper into our existing 300 metro markets.
With that said, our cash-rich MLAs provide great optionality to pay an increasing dividend and invest even more in our core business in lieu of paying down debt. Regardless of our capital allocation policy, our runway for organic growth appears long and fruitful, especially given strong industry tailwinds. With that, operator, we're now ready to take questions.
As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of David Barden from Bank of America.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Appreciate it. Kenny, you know, can you talk a little bit about where we sit now with the sale leaseback business where, you know, every incremental capital dollar you're putting to work kind of generates an 8% return day one, but your bonds are yielding 9%-13%. Presumably, that's the cheapest part of your capital structure. Your equity is gonna be more expensive. Your cost of capital is a lot higher than the yield that you're generating at the margin in this business. How do we think about resolving that, you know, as an investable thesis?
Just second on the fiber business itself, you know, again, you know, the inevitable question is, you know, the transformational, you know, transaction out there that's gonna, you know, unlock the value that you guys see in this fiber business. Is that practically doable, you know, in the current market climate, kind of with the rates going where they are and the recession coming? You know, how do you convince people that, you know, that's still a thing that can be done?
Good morning, David. Yeah, on your first question, I think you're right. I mean, you're right about part of what you said that generally our anchor yields, whether it's sale-leasebacks or greenfield builds or any other anchor-type agreements, are in the 5%-10% range. You know, as you mentioned, 8%. So that's kind of at the higher end of that range. That's been our one part of our true north, if you will, for many years, kind of sticking to that range. But importantly, then through lease-up, you're getting well above 10% yields. You know, the second page in our materials consistently is where are we tracking on that? Well, we're tracking at 22% cash yields as a result.
Yeah, there are different projects that are at different stages of maturity along the way. On an aggregate basis, our core business is returning, you know, 22% yields, and frankly, those are going higher. I see every day a dashboard of yields that are being generated from our CapEx, and they're very attractive, you know, 50%+ yields. With respect to what could be a temporarily high interest rate environment, I agree with you. You know, you're looking at high single digits, low double digits in terms of some of the yields that are out there, but we're still hurdling those comfortably with our core business, and I don't see that changing.
With respect to your second question, you know, we're really trying to get away from this quarter to quarter play by play on M&A. It's just not constructive. Look, I do think that in these types of, I'll put the old banker hat back on.
Mm-hmm.
In these types of environments, there's, you know, two, three different types of counterparties out there. One is those that just go into bunker mode and wanna do nothing, you know, the fetal position, if you will, and there's no criticism of that. The other is counterparties who look to take advantage of forced sellers or forced buyers and, you know, we call them bottom feeders, you know, people who are just looking to take advantage and, you know, frankly, we're not engaging with parties like that, and frankly, never have. Thirdly, there are parties who are much more savvy, who have a lot of capital.
Make no mistake, despite the market backdrop, there is a lot of equity capital and debt capital sitting on the sidelines looking to be put to work, whether that be in public securities or private. A lot of it is out there, earmarked for digital infrastructure. There's a huge opportunity out there. There are savvy, sophisticated counterparties who look at situations like this as an opportunity to engage in more creative structures or in more bespoke type transactions. You're seeing some of those deals happen.
You know, we saw a deal a few days ago. One of the large funds did a large transaction and basically spoke for the debt financing themselves as opposed to relying upon the public markets. Look, opportunities are out there. I think one thing we've proven, hopefully we've proven in our history in doing M&A, is that we're able to execute on down the fairway cash acquisitions, and we've also executed on mergers. We've executed on much more creative type transactions, and that's never not going to be a part of our DNA.
I also think very strongly, our Board thinks very strongly that having the ability to be patient in M&A is critical, because being a forced buyer or a forced seller almost always results in a subpar outcome. For us, you know, every day, we're executing on a business that's generating we think terrific returns. We think it's a business that is highly valued, especially in the private market. With that execution and the platform, we think we're creating value every day, and it affords us the ability to be patient for what could be value accretive M&A, either in the near term or longer term.
Thanks, Kenny. Makes sense.
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Gregory Williams from Cowen.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Just first one, you mentioned, Kenny, about expansion to eventually the 300 markets you're in. Do you have a sort of cadence on, you know, how many markets you'd expand, you know, per quarter or per year? That'd be helpful. Second question is just if you're seeing any labor supply or inflation concerns on the business. Just in the last 2 days, you know, we heard Lumen talk about, you know, slowing down on their fiber enablements to their homes. The day before that, I think Consolidated said their cost per home pass is coming up a little bit. I'm wondering if you're seeing that broadly or maybe more particularly in the Windstream fiber to the home space. Thanks.
Morning, Greg. I'll let Paul comment on some of the second part of the question. On the first part, yeah, we're actively looking at all of our metro markets and prioritizing. I don't have a something we're ready to roll out yet in terms of the cadence. I think probably in February we'll have a little more color on that. The reality is, yeah, and part of the reason we picked one of our markets, in this case, Birmingham, and showed some of the investment opportunity in that market, that's a terrific market for us. It's right down the fairway for being a Tier 2 market. Not a lot of competition there.
We've been in there since 2017 with an anchor award, and we've been chipping away at enterprise market share now for, you know, 4 or 5 years, and we're still only at 5%. We've got these just what I characterize as low hanging fruit investment opportunities in those existing markets, you know. We mentioned being able to expand into the Homewood neighborhood for less than $1 million. The reality is that's when you really peel back the onion, it's spending a couple hundred thousand dollars to expand the backbone, and then the rest of that is just all success-based to light up new customers. The returns on that capital, back to the earlier question, are just terrific.
You know, it's very high yielding returns without a lot of incremental OpEx, you know, because we already have people on the ground there. We've got salespeople, operations people, et cetera. All that to say the near term opportunities for us on market expansion are building out existing markets, as opposed to, in the near term at least, expanding into brand new markets. You know, we have a robust fiber network in Little Rock, for example. Today we're not offering any enterprise services, but we're a wholesale provider here. We're providing wholesale to, you know, 3 or 4 additional carriers. While we're focusing enterprise on more of the southeastern markets, and eventually we'll start to expand that footprint.
In the meantime, we're getting really nice returns on some of these other metro markets through dark fiber sales or just wholesale in general. I think it's just a real nice way for our Uniti Fiber and Uniti Leasing businesses to be complementing each other. With respect to the supply side, I think that we are feeling some pressure, like we've said, generally on the labor side, finding you know in order to keep crews fully staffed and even our number of quota-bearing reps is down.
I mean, we're hitting all of our targets and exceeding our targets on bookings, but the reality is our number of enterprise sales reps is down something like 15% or 20% compared to our plan. The silver lining in that is we're still hitting our bookings numbers because our existing reps are more productive, but we're still behind plan. Frankly, we'd be doing a lot better if we could keep that fully staffed. That's just day-to-day blocking and tackling. I think with respect to pricing pressure or cost increasing, I mean, Paul, you can comment, but we're seeing some of that, but not huge.
Yeah, no, I agree with that comment, Kenny. I mean, it is obviously a very tight labor supply market out there. In terms of the construction of our network, the labor that we rely on to construct our network, we use primarily a contractor labor force to build that network. We really have not seen to date any market increase in the cost we're paying for labor in our construction, in the construction part of our business. I attribute that to a few things. One, we have a deep bench of contractors that are focused really primarily in one region in the Southeast.
We have a really steady, consistent supply of work, and we have a very robust competitive bidding system for those, for all of those jobs. I think those factors together have helped to keep those costs stable for us, which doesn't mean that we're completely immune from rising labor costs there either. To date, we really have not seen any material increase in the labor piece of the cost of construction.
That's helpful. Thank you.
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Frank Louthan from Raymond James.
Great. Thank you. Pretty material downtick there in the quota-bearing heads. Where are you losing folks to? And do you think you can get that back up and maybe expand that? And is there any concern for the outlook for next year with the base going down that much?
Yeah, Frank, no concern about next year. I think, again, the real takeaway from that is a positive one in the sense that we're still hitting our numbers because our existing reps are more productive, and we just have so much opportunity to monetize the network, going back to some of the slides in our prepared remarks. With that said, yeah, we're very focused on getting that number higher. Look, if you go back in our history over the past couple, three years, we've always struggled to keep that number where we want it to be. Part of the reason for that is our team is very selective on adding new reps.
Once we get those reps on board, we're also very proactive about churning out reps who are not productive. I think our churn rate is something like 20%, on reps who aren't productive. We don't, you know, I don't consider it a problem or a leading indicator of a problem that that number is lower. At the same time, yeah, we're constantly looking to add new quality reps. We're always looking for ways to tweak our existing commission plan or compensation plan or otherwise in order to do that. At the same time, we're not going to move away from the discipline and the rigor that we apply to holding those reps accountable, and productive.
At the end of the day, I think if we wanted to just hit a number for number of reps, we could do that. That's not what we're gonna do.
Sure. Okay. To follow up on a previous question, do you think Windstream is having any issues in getting trucks or equipment or so forth to hit their build plans, and any chance they would stretch their build plans out due to increased costs?
Frank, we have an opinion on that, but we're gonna let them address that. I think they've got an earnings call coming up, we'll let them address that directly.
All right. Fair enough. Thank you very much.
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Simon Flannery from Morgan Stanley.
Great. Thank you very much. Good morning. On the fiber business, I think, Kenny, you did talk about capital intensity coming down over time, but also you've got this nice backlog here. How should we think about near-term capital intensity? You're still over that 40% level this year. Is that gonna come down to that sort of mid-30s% you've talked about over the next year or two? And any update on DISH? I think you'd sort of said that you hope that as the Sprint business came off, that DISH would start to kick in in 2023. Any updated clarity on what their plans are?
Hey, Simon. Yeah, our capital intensity is gonna come down. So nothing new or no changes to any forward-looking guidance we've given there. I think the reality is, and I mean, part of what we're trying to show in some of our materials is just where our capital is being invested, and how we're getting the good returns that we're getting. And as I said, the yields that we're getting on the capital is actually better than we've been forecasting. So theoretically, we could spend less capital and get the same returns. And so, you know, we're looking for ways to spend the capital, always looking for ways to spend the capital more efficiently, get the highest returns.
That's not going to change. With respect to the trajectory of the capital intensity coming down, that isn't going to change. DISH, you continue to make great strides with DISH. You know, when we first started talking about DISH and Sprint a couple of years ago, I think we said there would be some Sprint churn. I think we said it would probably be in the $5 million-$10 million recurring revenue range that we would lose, and that we thought that DISH would eventually replace that and more. In the meantime, there'd be some pretty lumpy ETL fees to sort of smooth that transition. In hindsight, I think that is playing out as we expected.
You know, the Sprint churn is on track with high ETLs this year, dropping off a little bit next year. DISH has really been ramping up. I think we will more than hurdle that $5 million-$10 million on this lost Sprint churn with DISH, with the business that we have already turned up or that we have in the backlog. Again, I think going forward over the longer term, we think there's a really, really attractive opportunity for us.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Rollins from Citi.
Thanks. Good morning. Just a strategic question. As you think of the fiber portfolio, and if you think about communications infrastructure more broadly, there are business models in this category that it really doesn't matter how big the portfolio is. If the local asset is the right asset, right, it tends to get sales. Yet there's other portfolios like data centers where there's been a nice cross sell. The larger the portfolio is, it seems like there's been this natural benefit for that. How would you describe fiber infrastructure in that? Is it one that benefits from being part of a larger portfolio, or is it, you know, if you have the right assets, the right location, you have a great chance of getting the win?
How does that instruct the type of strategic aspirations that you have for Uniti over a multiyear period?
Morning, Michael. Scale does matter in fiber. I think that especially on the wholesale side, the national network. You know, when you have a national network, you're in a very different class of providers, and your ability to have conversations with large carriers, the data center providers, the hyperscalers, you're just in a different class because they need national network. And from our vantage point, when you look at our national strategic accounts business today versus what it looked like a year or two ago, it's changed dramatically to the point where, you know, it just kinda rolls off the tongue that we're having conversations with the hyperscalers. I won't use any specific names.
We're just in a different category with respect to those types of conversations and therefore the business opportunity that it presents. So our leasing business is growing at 10%, 15%, 20% a year as a result with very high margins and great returns. It also, you know, having that national network, you know, provides you with the ability to have more bespoke type transactions and conversations. You know, we mentioned the lit backhaul reterm that we just signed. You know, that's 1,100 sites. There aren't very many people that have that many sites with each of the carriers.
When you have that many sites and you have the capital available and the brand to deliver 10 Gb, that puts you, again, on a different plane. You know, extending a lit backhaul contract from 2.5 years to 8 years is a big deal, and that's why we called it out. You don't get those types of opportunities unless you have real scale. With all that said, Michael, if you don't have high quality, dense metro fiber in select markets with minimal competition, good demographics, good growth potential, you can't be successful in fiber, in our view. As a result, we're really focused on the metro element of our business.
You know, we're the local partner with the national scale. In markets like Birmingham, you know, we've got boots on the ground. We know the various permitting authorities. We know the local. We know all the local businesses. We know the terrain. We know what it costs to build. We know where the opportunities are to expand our network and pick up low-hanging fruit. You don't get that unless you're very conscious about which metro markets you go into, and you make investments. You stick to the 5%-10% anchor yields, and you've got a clear path to lease up.
If you pick the right markets, you've got a plethora of customer opportunities, including enterprise, schools, traditional wholesale, and then, of course, lit backhaul, dark fiber backhaul, and small cells. That's really what we're seeing. When you've got the right network and the right market, you can have a great opportunity for both anchor and lease up and a healthy balance of both.
Thanks. Just, you know, one quick follow-up. What's the algorithm these days for the minimal capital intensity in fiber as a percent of revenue to replace churn and to keep that fiber revenue flat to organically growing over time?
Yeah, we haven't disclosed that number I think in some time. I don't know if we ever have, actually. Our maintenance CapEx is around 3%, and you know, our capital intensity is from an aggregate basis. I really think we're our churn is very low. I mean, we talk about it as industry-leading. It's certainly right up there with or right down there in terms of industry-leading, so very, you know, very low, 0.2%. We'll have to refresh on that number, Michael, but I really think it's kind of around, probably around 10%, you know, plus or minus a little bit, but right around 10%.
Thanks.
Thank you. At this time, I would like to turn the conference back to Kenny Gunderman for closing remarks.
Look forward to updating you further on future calls. Uniti Group. Thank you for joining today.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.