All right, let's get started. Good afternoon. My name's Greg Williams. I cover cable, wireless, fiber, and fiber to the home here at TD Cowen. Joined in this session by the CEO of Uniti, Kenny Gunderman. Kenny, thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having us, Greg. This is one of our favorite conferences, so thank you for having us.
Thank you very much for that. Maybe we can just start with the company, which has a lot of momentum building, both enterprise, certain commercial and AI fiber, as well as the residential fiber business. Can you walk us through Uniti's key initiatives for the balance of the year?
Yeah. We just celebrated, almost a week ago, our one-year anniversary of the merger with Windstream. At the time, we promised a few things. One, that we would clean up the complicated structure that preexisted, and we'd replace it with one that would greatly enhance our cost of capital, and we followed through on that.
And really executed on that. Secondly, that we would remove the dis-synergies of that structure and replace it with real operational synergies and savings, and bring together the Windstream Wholesale business with the Uniti Leasing Wholesale business and get real synergies and real opportunity on attacking the hyperscaler business, and we followed through big time on that one. Probably the real bright spot of the merger, frankly. Thirdly, we promised we would really accelerate the Kinetic build, and we have done that materially. We really hit the ramp in the second quarter on the build. Then fourthly, we said all of those things would help position us to approach M&A from a position of strength, really on our front foot, as opposed to the way the two companies were pursuing it in the past, and we are making great progress there, too.
So with all that said, our priorities for the second half of the year are to just continue with the playbook that we have laid out. Executing on the Kinetic build, continuing to pursue more hyperscaler activity, and bring more of that book of business in-house.
and just executing on the strategic front. So very excited about the second half of the year.
Okay. Before we get into many scenarios, I do want to talk about the stock, because I thought second quarter was operationally a record quarter in some ways. Record Kinetic fiber adds, record home construction, record fiber infrastructure bookings. Yet shares pulled back pretty meaningfully after the print. Why do you think the market reacted the way it did?
You can keep going if you want to keep listing the record metrics, by the way, because I do think we had a legitimately strong quarter. That was a conscious effort on our part coming out of the merger, which was to put together several quarters of strong performance, set goals, and meet or exceed them. The simple things. We are really proud of the fact that we have done that. Three quarters in a row of solid performance, solid progress on the KPIs that actually matter to our business. We put together a quarter and a raise and guidance that are legitimate. There is not a bunch of one-time items that are supporting that, right? There are really legitimate improvements in KPIs. We are very excited about it. Yeah, the stock reaction was disappointing.
We have had a lot of investor interaction over the past two weeks, and our best assessment is that folks had built up some expectation about M&A. Because our name has been in the news, as it often is.
Yeah.
I think there was an expectation for something to happen there, and it did not, and therefore a little bit of air out of the balloon, if you will.
Yeah.
It doesn't change the fact we had a great quarter, and increased guidance for the balance of the year, and we're going to continue to execute on the things that we can control.
Sure. I don't expect you to comment on anything unsubstantiated, but help us deal with how you think about value optimization, and there's so many permutations that could happen in M&A. Just maybe generally, and more specifically I guess, not going into details, but are you in the M&A market today? Are you active?
Yes.
Okay.
We're very active. As I said in my opening remarks, it's one of the things that we promised to investors as a rationale for the merger, and we're following through on that. I think one of the challenges with M&A is you can't give quarter-to-quarter updates in the same way you can show progress on KPIs of the business.
Of course.
I'm more bullish than I've ever been on our prospects. I'm more bullish on the strategic value of our assets than I've ever been. We're constantly engaged with the market to do that to assess our intrinsic value relative to where we trade, relative to what we think can be realized for our shareholders in the public markets. I know that from an M&A perspective, it's very important to have a well-performing business where you can show progress and growth.
Sure.
For us, the further we're removed from the merger date, the more progress we show and the more intrinsic value we're able to demonstrate.
Yeah.
Unlike others in the space over the past 12, 18, 24 months, we're not a for-seller. We don't have self-imposed timelines. We're just executing methodically. I'm extremely excited about our prospects.
What would be the ideal scenarios in a potential sale? I would think one buyer for the whole company, I imagine is far cleaner. Maybe said another way, do multiple buyers, does that complicate the tax situation for players involved, including Elliott?
Yeah. I think we lived in a world of complexity for years. As you know, Uniti and Windstream as separate companies, so we certainly prefer simplicity over complexity, and I think that's probably a fair statement as a public company in general. We're also not afraid of complexity, and when you look at the landscape and look at ways that people are interacting with capital sources or strategic partners, there are joint ventures, whether it's in the data center business or certainly joint ventures in the fiber-to-the-home business. We're looking at a whole host of options and alternatives to help maximize shareholder value. While complexity is not preferred, it's certainly not a disqualifier for us. We've got the team in place and the ability to lean into complex solutions. As you know, Greg, we set up the business to be modular.
Sure
Kinetic, Uniti Fiber.
Solutions
Uniti Solutions and Uniti Wholesale.
The non-core piece we could talk about.
The non-core piece, we did that to provide ourselves flexibility for strategic optionality. We're probably leaving some synergies on the table as a result, right? We have three different B2B businesses under one umbrella. That's not the most efficient way to approach the market, but from a cost-benefit perspective, we think that strategic optionality is what makes sense for our shareholders. From a tax perspective, you would be surprised, the tax leakage on us pursuing some creative structures is probably less than you would think.
Okay. That's good to know. Speaking of modulating the business, one area maybe a sticking point, that's the question, is the legacy copper and the legacy wholesale business. Could that be a challenge? Folks these days, they want fiber and fiber to the home and does that leave this sort of a sore thumb out there of legacy stuff?
Yes and no. I think I joke that certain people say they don't want copper, and I say I don't either. It's a part of the world that we're in, and copper provides a great opportunity, too, because-
To upgrade for cheaper.
to upgrade for cheaper, and we have a headstart on overbuilders, and we're really taking advantage of that. When it comes to that part of our business, I think it's really important for us to show a build engine that has a repeatable function that's predictable. So over a two or three year period of time, with our build engine at the cadence that it's at now, you can see copper becoming a very immaterial part of our business over the next several years. Plus, we have a terrific copper decommissioning strategy that's in motion. So I'm not worried about that part of our business. On the other parts of the business, the legacy services, as we've talked about, these are things like TDM and-
Legacy transport, legacy products. Those parts of our business do not in any way inhibit our growth on fiber. There's no brand degradation. There's no deprioritization of management resources or otherwise. We really manage those businesses for cash, and we almost manage them more through the finance organization than we do any other part of the business. I say that because it's certainly a drag on numbers for public investors and analysts, and that's understandable. But when you peel back the layer and you start having strategic conversations and people see the cash flow benefits of those businesses, it's less of a drag than you think.
Okay. How is Elliott involved in the process, if at all? Any considerations outside of a typical process given the ownership?
Yeah. As a common practice, I don't like to comment on specific shareholders.
Okay
But Elliott is the world's largest activist shareholder, and they own 20% of our stock. I have intentionally discussed with them what they're comfortable with us expressing publicly.
I've done that. I would say that they're a very constructive shareholder. It's great to have them on the board. They have a board seat, and they have skin in the game. As a result, they're really focused on maximizing shareholder value. They also approach this investment more like a private equity investment than a trading position. That's important because I think, if I were an outsider looking in, I might worry about those shares coming to market sometime and being an overhang. The reality is, I think they view their exit as more of a strategic exit than they do a public market exit. If you want proof of that, just look at the proxy and how the board member is motivated through his compensation package.
Right
On.
Okay. Good to know. The non-core assets, you mentioned on the call, you have up to $1 billion of non-core assets, and you could sell them over the next 12 to 36 months. What are the assets that are out there? I think you mentioned unused fiber, even the DSL plants, real estate, even the copper metals or something. What are the, sort of those lists or even ones I didn't mention, what are the maybe low-hanging fruit you could sell?
Yeah.
Are you getting interested parties today on, and which ones?
I'm glad you mentioned the 12 to 36 months. We're still not at that 12 months yet, just to be clear.
Okay. Yeah. Right.
We said that intentionally, right? We wanted our investors to know that this was something that we were focused on, and we wanted them to know to expect any activity over a longer period of time, 12 to 36 months, because we're pursuing that very opportunistically. I would say that we're making really solid progress that I'm excited about. Some of the low-hanging fruit are spectrum licenses, for example, that were bought for optionality that we think are better in others' hands. We have fiber in our footprint that is currently not being used by us and probably won't be used by us any time in the next two or three years. We also have markets, both on the Kinetic side and otherwise, that maybe they're cable properties or maybe they're just properties where we don't plan to build fiber any time soon.
Those are markets that could be more valuable in others' hands. When you add all that up, I would say, a lot of conviction around that range of value, $500 million to $1 billion of non-core assets, and I think it would take us 12 to 36 months to realize that. I think we're making great progress in that regard.
Great. Great. Why don't we shift gears on Kinetic? Because another thing that came up, I think, on the earnings call, and the earnings print is your consumer fiber ARPU, it did fall 2.6% in the second quarter. The low single-digit decline was expected. Overall, when we asked the questions on the call, it sounds like you're still adhering to a 2%-3% growth in 2026 and in 2027. Just the question, I guess is help us get comfortable with the expected broadband ARPU recovery. Why should ARPU get better when you just look around and you see the aggressive cable front book?
Yeah.
You see fixed wireless and the promotional intensity. Even just looking at the print of a lot of these broadband carriers and ARPU's been depressed. So what gives you that confidence amid all the bear signals?
Well, that is a great question. I like how you framed it because I do think we knew the competitive environment was going to be fierce coming into the year. When we gave that 2%-3% guidance, we were factoring that into our thinking and still have a lot of conviction around that 2%-3% growth in the fourth quarter, so year-over-year 2026 versus 2025 and going forward. We also expected a little bit of turbulence throughout the year, right? Because the wireless carriers are discounting fiber to pull in wireless. That's their whole convergence strategy. That's in motion and started in the first half of the year. Cable is reacting to that, and cable is looking for, or big cable at least, is looking for a defensible line in their retreat, if you will.
They're using aggressive promotional activity, and we responded to that. As you know, Greg, we've historically had a little bit higher ARPU than most in the industry, and we've used some of that in the first half of the year to retain customers. I would also say that to your question about the second half of the year, our systems and processes and team are more refined going into the second half of the year than they were in the first half. Remember that our customer care and our retention team really was only put in place in February.
Okay. Yeah.
It took a little bit of time to ramp the team and the systems. Harrobin was in place at legal day one, but the recruiting process-
Yeah
That team really was only up and functioning in February and March. That took a little bit of time in our peak-
Yeah
Competition period, our team was getting onboarded. A little bit of building the engine with the plane flying, but in the second half of the year-
Yeah
I am highly confident that a lot of the retention and credits that were given up in the first half of the year, we are going to claw those back. That is a big part of it. We have some new value-added services that we have just rolled out. Always on Wi-Fi, YouTube TV, relatively new. We are excited about what we are seeing on the ramp there. As you know, we have talked about repeatedly, less than half of our base is taking 1G or above. We have got upsell opportunities on speed.
Yeah.
Importantly, I think the industry is going to start to rationalize more. We have heard of at least one of our big competitors that has already done a price up, and we think another one is coming.
We like to hear about competitors doing price ups.
A more rational market.
I feel like we are going to have a little bit more rational market.
On your first point, you said, maybe I would say it another way, in February, you are still, I mean, it is only a couple of months ago, maybe you were to protect their base and retain, that it was more of a blunt strategy to use price and then figure it out later, and now you are going to have a more refined strategy in the second half.
Substantially more refined. We've got AI now monitoring every single one of our inbound calls
Okay
and refining our script and refining our offers to customers based upon those calls, but also overlaying that with what we know our competitors are doing in market. We didn't have that in the first half of the year. We now have that, for example.
Okay.
Much better performance management with the new team being on the field. We've really clawed back the ability to give retention credits, for example. So our frontline folks can't give that without permission. So those are just a few examples, and I think we're going to see a lot better performance there.
Okay, great. Maybe talk about the DSL losses. They are outside losses for the quarter, at least by my estimates. Maybe a general breakdown of the percentage of disconnects, like how much was due to your own migration of the customer versus cable taking them? Now we've got fixed wireless, and maybe this is a second completely different question, but then now LEO's in the mix, and so maybe if you can tell us about your outsized DSL losses and what drive that and how we should think about it going forward.
Yeah. We've gotten a lot of questions about LEO in the past couple of months.
Okay. Well, that's my next question.
All right. I may hit it in this answer. If not, you'll come back. Look, stepping back, our DSL strategy is to focus our fiber build on markets where we have the most acute competitive threat. That to us is overbuilder threat. So in other words, we're building in markets that are probably a little bit bigger and more urban, suburban, which for us is not New York City, right? That's just a little bit bigger markets, but it's markets that are probably less susceptible to fixed wireless or LEO competition.
But we're focusing on those markets because we want to dissuade overbuilders, and we also want to compete more effectively against cable. So we rank our competitive threat as overbuilders, cable, and fixed wireless and LEO are a distant third.
Okay.
That is important, for a reason I will come back to. Secondly, you mentioned migrations. We are very aggressively focused on migrating copper to fiber, to the point where we are not even selling DSL in about 800,000 of our locations because we have identified through our copper decommissioning strategy a plan to decommission copper markets, which we think are going to go cash flow negative at some point.
We want to get ahead of that, and we are not selling in those markets. You talked about ARPU earlier. Our fiber ARPU is down, but our DSL ARPU is up 10%, 11%.
Right. So you are hiking the price, forcing them out, and then you can shut down the wire centers at safe.
We do not like to say hiking and pressuring, but yes.
Okay.
We're price increasing our DSL customers.
I say all that because the end result of that is, yeah, DSL churn might run a little bit hot, but some of that's expected through the migrations. Also focusing on markets where we're less worried about DSL, I'm sorry, LEO.
Yeah
And fixed wireless. I do think over the next two or three years, as we've said many times, when we start to build to those more rural markets, we're going to take share back from LEO and fixed wireless because while those are good products, they don't compete against fiber in the long term.
Right.
We're going to have a cheaper product, a better product, and we're going to take back share.
Yeah. Less of a clunky experience. No dish in your backyard or-
Right
For sure. Can you talk about LEO overall? What you think the end game is? How much of the market could they take? Maybe, like you said, not in the fiber-to-the-home territories, but in the copper territories. Where do you think they'll ultimately shake out? 10% of the market, 15% of the U.S. broadband market?
Well, let me preface that by saying, as you know, we're a big wholesale fiber provider.
LEO is a better customer of ours than they are a threat to us-
Right
On the Kinetic side.
Because you are linking the ground stations?
We are linking ground stations. We are connecting data centers. We are getting terrific business on the backhaul side.
Yeah.
I think that is going to continue. As we have often talked about the threat from fixed wireless, we are hedged.
Yeah, same idea.
Same idea, same concept, probably on steroids. We don't view LEO as a competitive threat at Kinetic any differently now than we did before their IPO. They did do some promotional activity before the IPO that led to some outsized losses, but we think that's similar
Okay
to cable and wireless. We think that's going to normalize. I don't know what percentage I would put on their market share going forward.
Okay.
It's not going to be any more material than it was before. Ultimately, for us, we believe when we build fiber into a market, we have a right to win versus any threat, including and especially LEO and fixed wireless. I do think that there's also an opportunity in these edge markets where we never build fiber to use LEO and maybe fixed wireless as alternative technologies to-
Yep
Satisfy regulatory obligations.
Yeah.
We're looking at that.
Okay.
When you put all that together, I think the opportunity on LEO is probably greater than the threat to us.
Okay. Can we talk about your churn initiatives? Fiber churn has been running at record lows. What are the initiatives to further reduce fiber churn from here? Where can it ultimately settle in at?
I look at fiber churn and penetration as symbiotic. We've really been performing well on bringing fiber churn down and also penetration, and our new cohorts at Kinetic have been performing extremely well.
It starts with the mindset of the team. We've got a true insurgent mindset of putting the customer first, taking share, as opposed to just defending the footprint, which is the old telco mentality. It starts with a mindset and putting a leadership team in place, which we've done, and very excited about the progress that's being made. Secondly, we've talked some about our AI systems and initiatives around managing the base, managing our call volume, refining our scripts, refining our performance management. Very important. It's something that John Harrobin , and Stacie Vongvanith did very well at Frontier, and we've obviously taken as many of those best practices as we can, and we're applying them to our base here.
We saw a little bit of that benefit in the first half of the year, and I think we're going to see a lot more of it in the second half and going into next year. Thirdly, we've talked about the benefit of clustering markets.
Yeah
And how we've really made a conscious effort on doing that at Kinetic. We've always done that at Uniti, focusing in the Southeast, for example. But when you cluster markets versus having more of a Swiss cheese approach, you get economies of scale on construction and servicing customers with boots on the ground, marketing.
Local marketing. Yeah.
Local marketing, all those things. We are really starting to see that. Our go to market is not peanut butter. It is not nationwide. It is much more targeted to specific-
Yeah
Geographies as we get into the second half of the year with more clustered markets and better systems and processes that give us the ability to do that, you are going to see continued improvements there. I could tell you where our fiber churn levels out in our model. I probably shouldn't give that-
Right
Because I don't think we have given that publicly, but I am excited about where that is going.
That is great. You also talked about penetration on having better systems and better AI. These clustering markets would help on that, because I was surprised to see your 2025 vintage penetration was super high. It was actually higher than some of the older vintages.
Yeah.
Is that the same idea? Is that what is going on, or is there something else to be said?
It is definitely the same idea. Look, when you go into some of these cohorts and you do not get it right the first time, it is sometimes a challenge to go back and get penetration up.
Yeah.
We saw some of that in those early cohorts at Kinetic. When you now look at the new go to market and you see the penetration levels that we are getting, that is what you should expect on a go-forward basis. We are definitely applying those learnings to the older cohorts, and we are starting to get better performance there. It is important to get it right the first time.
Sure.
We are definitely seeing that.
Right. Do we need to recalibrate the terminal penetration? Since we have spoken in years past, it is 40%, 45% going to 50%. But now since then, we have got fixed wireless that is doing better than folks thought. Like you said, LEO is probably not much of an issue. But we did, I guess, wake up the giants with the big cable folks getting very aggressive on their front book. Curious where you think terminal penetration would level out at.
If we were to recalibrate it would be higher, not lower.
Higher.
We are not changing our guidance today.
Yeah.
I would say it would be higher, not lower, really for a few reasons. One, like I said, LEO's not a different or better competitive threat today than they were six months ago. It is the same as we expected. We expected cable to react as they have. We did not know exactly what they might do, but we knew when you start losing material broadband share, they are going to do something. That is not unexpected and not a surprise. Neither are the convergence offerings, right? The wireless carriers have been talking about those pull-through benefits, and that is not a surprise.
I would say on the positive side, our penetration has been better than expected going into these latter cohorts, and we have been very pleasantly surprised that by targeting the build on the markets that are most susceptible to overbuilders, we have been able to dissuade overbuilders from coming into the footprint. I would say that is probably been an outperformance as well relative to our initial model. So when you put all those things together and the fact that we have the Kinetic team up and running and functioning well, we are pretty excited about the growth potential.
How should I think about funding? I just want to shift gears a bit. You completed another Kinetic ABS raise, and you are accelerating homes, which I think is the right move. When do you think you need to go back to the debt markets to finish the funding of the entire build plan?
We never want to foreshadow capital markets activity too much. I will say that ABS has been a terrific product for us. Again, probably better than we expected. By the way, that is one of the things that gives us more latitude on non-core asset sales because we are just really performing well on the ABS side. Part of that is a market-driven matter. Frontier is no longer in the market, so there is more supply for fiber to the home ABS. Our cohorts are performing better than expected. So we are able to demonstrate to the investors that we are outperforming, and that gives us more capacity. So we are very excited about the opportunity there. We are probably going to do one or two ABS deals a year.
Okay.
I think we've talked about the capacity there being $5 billion. I think that's a conservative number, especially because those cohorts are performing well.
Does that five go to four now, though, because you just did a one on one?
No, it's five.
It's still five.
in total.
Okay.
We think if you do that math, there's more than enough ABS capacity to well fund our plan.
Okay, great. You've got to fund the CapEx too, which you brought up by $100 million, again, accelerating the builds. Can you help us unpack the answer from the second quarter call about, I think I asked, how much of it is warehousing? You're pulling forward and permitting and planning and getting all that up to speed so you can accelerate the build. My second question would be that you guys noted that your fiber to the home fiber might go up in 2027. The question I have is that, well, does that impact the fiber on the commercial side, too? Is fiber going to be going up in general?
Yeah, really good questions. There's a lot there. We really ramped the build in the second quarter, as you know, and we increased the number of homes that we're going to get to this year from a guidance perspective. Part of the CapEx increase was just that. We're going to build more homes. I would say that's probably 25%-30% of that increase, and the rest is pulling forward, setting up for a higher build in 2027, if we choose to do it. That's important, right? I'm not saying we're doing that necessarily, but based upon the build engine that we have today, and we just built over 50,000 homes in July.
When you run rate these numbers, you are at 550,000 to 600,000 homes a year if we really wanted to do it, which is where we want to be, to a point where the board can now make a capital allocation decision and not worry about whether we can build it or not. It is more, do we want to spend the capital? A big part of it was pulling in pre-engineering and pre-positioning to ready for a higher build. It really was not cost increases, and that is important. We have been clear that CPE costs are higher, fiber costs are higher, but we think in our 2026 numbers and even 2027, we have captured that and put brackets around it for our model. That is true of Kinetic and fiber infrastructure.
Okay
By the way, I think the bigger issue on fiber is just supply and making sure that we stay well ahead of the allocation, from our key vendors and making sure we have got plenty of supply for the incredible hyperscaler demand that is out there.
Are you high enough on the list to get that supply? There is a big queue.
Yeah, great question. We think we are. We like to say we are at the adult table.
Okay
when it comes to the allocation, which helps on pricing too, by the way. I think for our vendors, they want to see a multi-year funnel of opportunity that's believable, and we have that. When they can see 12 or 24 months of tremendous demand coming from us, then we get, maybe not at the head of the line, but we're one of the top two or three folks in line for our allocation. I have no doubt that we've got plenty of allocation for what opportunity we have on the table today.
Okay. The last few questions are going to be on the commercial and AI fiber side, which is obviously demand is record levels. You mentioned superscalers as another one in the mix now, too. Those are, I assume, like AI labs or AI-focused, high rack density, that sort of companies, because there's hyperscalers, neo-clouds. Help flush out the customer set, and this-
Yeah
is a new one.
We're making up names because the diversity of customers are incredible. Yeah, record quarter bookings, and one of the things that I'm most excited about is it was from a diverse base of customers. The hyperscalers who you know well, the neo-clouds, it's well documented who those are. The superscalers to us are just high bandwidth customers like SpaceX and Akamai and-
Yeah
Anthropic, Uber, and Netflix, all customers of ours, some of whom were large customers during the quarter. Really healthy mix of demand from each of those, and importantly, a healthy mix of both lit and dark demand.
Yeah.
We talked about one of the rationales of our merger was bringing together the network and the dark fiber prowess at Uniti with the lit fiber capabilities of Windstream. This is the first quarter where we really saw both of those coming together at the same time.
Sure.
I think that that's going to be the new norm going forward.
I do want to mention, talk about the Wave business a little bit. Before I do that, though, I do want to talk about the creditworthiness.
Yeah
of the neo-clouds. Because, of course, the banks don't really loan to them to go build any new data centers anymore. I'm generalizing here, but then, of course, they get backstopped by some of the hyperscalers. I don't think they're going to backstop the fiber services. How do you think about credit risk and creditworthiness of new customers?
We think about it every time we have an opportunity with a customer that we don't know or haven't done business with, or frankly, it may be a name we're not familiar with. I joked a little bit about the term superscalers, but in reality, we're met with new customer logos on a daily basis.
Yeah.
I think historically, we've done a good job of assessing credit quality and ultimately protecting ourselves through deal terms and Ts and Cs, and we're just going to have to continue doing that going forward. I will say, up to this point, the deals that we've inked have either been investment-grade or wrapped by investment-grade quality. That's going to change, and on a go-forward basis, we're just going to have to be a lot smarter. I'm not saying we haven't been in the past, but on a go-forward basis, we have to really be on our game when it comes to assessing credit quality.
Got it. Last question is on Waves, if I can sneak another one in here. It was encouraging to see that 50% or greater than 50% of your bookings were lit services, and I read that as the Wave service sort of taking off, and I read that even further, maybe inference, as the de facto connectivity for Waves. Maybe you can talk about where you are. What kind of routes are you selling, and is it indeed probably inference and inference nodes that are covering? Because you can see the locations generally and the pricing environment and what are you selling?
Yeah
the 400G Waves?
Yeah. We do not want to be a nationwide Wave provider. That is not our strategy. We do not want to go toe-to-toe with five or six Wave provider on Tier 1 routes. That is pricing. You are competing on price, and you are competing on how fast you can turn Waves up. That is not saying that is a bad business, but we would rather be competing on uniqueness of routes, network quality, and customer service, same way we are in our Tier 2 and Tier 3 metro strategy. That has worked well for us on the Waves side.
Stick to your locations, stick to your niche.
Stick to your locations, and we have got tons of unique routes with our Tier 2 and Tier 3 backbone connecting all these Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets. That has always been our strategy, but now when you overlay the fact that we have been building to these unique data centers, it is supercharged because now people want Waves connecting those data centers.
Sure.
It is not just these unique metro markets. They now want to connect these data centers, and that is helpful for us in a lot of ways because we are now leasing up the fiber that we just built
Sure
to these data centers over the past couple or three years. I say that because we do have the strategy where we can turn up Wave in 14 days or 21 days
and we can compete on price, but where we are really focusing on is the Wave product where it is more of a bespoke transaction.
Yeah.
It is less about competing against another Wave provider and more about what are the Ts and Cs of the opportunity. It is much more analogous to a dark fiber type deal.
Our pricing generally on 400G Waves is in the $4,000-$5,000 range.
But that could vary materially depending on the route and the customer and their need for capacity.
Got it. Well, with that, we're out of time. Thank you, Kenny.
Thank you, Greg. It's always good to be here.