For those of you that I haven't met yet, I'm Mike Rollins, and I'm joined with my colleague, Roberta Versiani, and we cover the communication services and infrastructure stocks for Citi. It's a real pleasure to welcome Ed McKay, President and CEO of Shentel. Ed, thank you so much for being with us today. Appreciate it. Great to be here in the city, and thank you for the invitation and the hospitality. Great. Just to get us started, maybe for those less familiar with your business, you can share a little bit about your strategy, your focus, and the key priorities, not just for the remainder of this year, but as you're looking out over time. Sure. Shentel, long-term operator founded in 1902 as a local telephone company. We've evolved into a cable company, and then now a fiber-first company. As far as our big priorities, we've been building out our Glo Fiber fiber to the premise network since 2019. It's a major construction project for us. By the end of the year, we'll have over 510,000 fiber passings, so major priority for us is wrap up construction by the end of the year. Another big priority is continue to grow our commercial fiber business. We now have almost 20,000 route miles of fiber stretching from Chicago to the Washington, D.C., area. We've had a lot of success with enterprise mid-market customers. Our wholesale and wireless carrier business for backhaul services is growing significantly. We also think we have a new opportunity for some data center connectivity as well. So that's a big priority. The third priority is operating efficiently, keeping our operating costs steady as we grow our top-line revenue with our fiber businesses. Talking a bit about your financial outlook, your 2026 guidance is targeting roughly 4% revenue growth and 12% EBITDA growth at the midpoint. What's the formula to get there, and is it sustainable for you to keep EBITDA growing faster than revenue in the long term? Yeah. For the short to mid-term, definitely sustainable. In our Glo Fiber markets, current data penetration about 21%, so we're targeting 37% penetration in the mid-term, five to seven years after we launch a market, and we're well on our way to reaching that. We have a lot of opportunity for organic growth in our business. When you look at our combined fiber businesses, our commercial fiber business and our Glo Fiber business, our revenue grew 21% over the past 12 months. We look at our Glo Fiber subscribers, they grew 31% over the past 12 months. So we certainly have a good organic growth trajectory there in the short to mid-term. When you think of the company and investors do their work, should they think of your company really as three businesses? You have the incumbent cable business, you have the kind of historical telecom and fiber markets, but then you've got these expansion markets. Let's group them together. So incumbent cable and fiber, the expansion markets where you're new into those regions, and then the third would be business and enterprise. Is that a fair way to think about Shentel? Yeah. I would recommend viewing it as a sum of the parts. The incumbent broadband business, which is, again, the cable and the telco, and then the commercial fiber business, and then our Glo Fiber business. Our fiber business is now 51% of our total revenue, so we've become a fiber dominance company. In the second quarter for the first time, that was when our fiber businesses overtook our incumbent business from a revenue standpoint, and we expect that trajectory to continue. Going back to the 37% fiber penetration target, that's for the mid-term, right? Where do you see it going long term? Also, are you seeing any changes in trends in fiber as you have more overbuilders entering the market, and also now satellite? Sure. Long term, we see upside from that 37%. When you look at our oldest cohorts that were built back in 2019, 2020, we are seeing some of them over 40% penetration now, and that number continues to grow. So we think long term, our fiber technology is superior to the cable competition, so we think there's a significant upside there. As far as competition from satellites, I would say the impact has been minimal so far. In the first quarter, we did see a small impact in our very rural cable markets. At that time, Starlink was basically giving away free equipment. They also had highly promotional pricing in place ahead of their IPO. But since then, we've seen them back off on the free equipment and the promotional pricing. But really virtually no impact in our Glo Fiber, fiber to the home markets. Very little impact in our more dense cable markets. The only place we really saw any activity was in the very rural cable markets. Since the first quarter of this year, that impact has declined. We've also rolled out new pricing plans in those very rural markets to give customers more value. So in those markets now, a Shentel customer, they can get twice the speeds as Starlink at a lower price. So we think we're positioned very well to compete there. Again, virtually no impact in our fiber to the home markets, which are becoming our largest part of our business. How is the competitive environment different between residential and your business segment? In the Glo Fiber markets, sometimes there is more commercial competition. There may be another third party in there providing commercial fiber services. In some cases, a local telephone company still has copper for their residential customers, but they actually have fiber for business customers. I would say a little more competition in some markets for commercial. With commercial, a small business customer in our Glo Fiber markets, they have twice the data ARPU as a residential customer. They also have a much higher take rate on phone services, and they pay more for those phone services. Even at a lower penetration rate on commercial fiber, or small business customers, we still get similar returns or even better returns in some cases, at a lower penetration rate versus a higher penetration rate in the residential areas. As far as other fiber competition, we have built out Glo Fiber in smaller tier 3, tier 4 markets, and our goal was to be the first fiber provider in those markets. We have very limited fiber competition in those markets. When we have built Glo Fiber into a new market, we have never seen a fiber overbuilder come in after us and deploy fiber. We have seen the local telephone company upgrade to fiber in some cases, but that has been a relatively small portion of our passings. Only 12, maybe 13% of our passings. 87%, 88% of our Glo Fiber passings, it is a duopoly. It is us and one of the big cable folks as the only wired broadband option. One of the interesting things, you guys give a lot of transparency on how the Glo Fiber has been doing across your, I guess we will call them vintages. Right. From the launch time of fiber into that market, you have been giving the Street regular updates on how the penetration is trending. What I have noticed in that chart is, not surprisingly, generally, the longer you are in a market, the more penetration you have. There are some kind of valleys along the way, some non-linearity. What causes that non-linearity to happen? Recognizing that you run a business, not a spreadsheet. Right. Whereas we look at spreadsheets. How do you get those markets back to that regression line, so to speak? Sure. We do pay very close attention to our cohorts in that penetration curve. Some of the valleys you may see in that penetration curve, some of that is due to competition. In a few of the cohorts, they were in Brightspeed markets. Shortly after we built those markets, Brightspeed upgraded to fiber to the home, so that slowed down our penetration curve. That penetration curve in those markets continues to grow. Again, that is a very small percentage of our passings. Only about 6% of our passings overlap with Brightspeed and their fiber to the home upgrades. Another area where you will see some slightly depressed numbers on the penetration curve is in the commercial passings. With commercial passings, that penetration curve is typically slower. We talked about potentially additional competition, but also, in some cases, those commercial customers are under contract. We have to wait for that contract to expire before we have a real opportunity to win that business. Those are the two main factors. Demographics also play a role in some of the cohort penetration curves. When we look at a market, we look at the demographics, and we have a target penetration. In a higher income market, maybe in the low 40% range that we are targeting, lower income market may be in the low 30% range. In either case, we can get the same IRR. We are targeting a 15%+ internal rate of return, and that is unlevered. On a levered basis, that is 20%+. Those higher income markets, they are typically less dense. Larger lot sizes, underground utilities, higher cost to pass, but we get a higher penetration rate, and those customers tend to go upstream taking higher speed services. When you are selecting a new market, how do you decide which market to continue investing in fiber in the coming years? Also, what are the characteristics you think about when you also consider exiting a specific market? Right. I would say we do not have any plans to exit any of our markets. Really, as far as new markets, we have already claimed all of the markets we want, so we are winding down construction at the end of the year. But when we selected our markets, competition was the first factor. Again, we had to be the first fiber provider in that market. So that was a key for us, and given the limited fiber competition we have now, we think we selected well. In addition to demographics, the other big factor is the cost to pass. How dense is the market, how much is underground versus aerial? A big factor is the cost to attach to poles. We ran into several markets where the power company was basically trying to charge us an outrageous rate for the permits and make-ready. Unfortunately, we had to back out of those markets because we could not hit our target returns with those high make-ready costs. But we have been very disciplined as far as our construction, and we were not trying to hit some large number. The key was selecting markets where we could hit our target return thresholds. Got it. Let us talk a little bit about your pricing power. How has your pricing strategy evolved over the last few years, and how do you think about customer segments, and which customer segments are you most focused on today? We are really a share taker at this point. We have kept our pricing constant really since we launched service. We have not raised rates since we launched service back in 2019. We have given customers more value. We have given them higher speed for the same price. We have had a tremendous amount of success at the middle to high end of the market. 80% of our customers take speeds of 1 Gbps or higher, and that includes about 19% taking 2 Gbps, about 5% taking 5 Gbps. That has helped us maintain our ARPU, even though we have actually started to offer five-year price guarantees in some cases. It seems like the category, when we look at the last couple of quarters, broadband ARPUs in general, just across the board, have been softer. I think the market is trying to understand, are we hitting a resistance point in terms of just what customers are spending relative to the history of broadband ARPUs where they are significantly up because of tiering and because of different price actions, partly or largely from cable? Or is this just a temporary lull? You are trying to, as you mentioned, get your share, get it up, and then at some point, you are going to return to trying to get price and create that balance P times Q math to drive revenue. Yeah. Ultimately, I believe we have pricing power. We have a superior product. Higher speeds, lower latency, higher reliability, and we certainly believe we have better customer service than our competition as well. Over time, we believe we have that pricing power as we take more market share. When you look at the ARPU, our large cable competitors last year started offering five-year price guarantees. We started offering that as well. When those guarantees expire, the revenue goes up by about $15 per customer. Also with our five-year price guarantee, that is just for the internet service itself. We also offer equipment add-ons, and that equipment add-on is free for only 12 months. After that, it goes to our rack rate, which is $12 for the basic Wi-Fi and then $5 for each repeater unit. We have some upside there as customers roll off of that initial free equipment offering that goes along with our five-year price plan. Also more recently, we have started experimenting with a shorter price guarantee term. I think there is some options there where we do not necessarily have to lock ourselves in for a five-year plan. Just out of curiosity, when you introduced these price locks, what effect did it have on sales, retention? Where did you see the benefit? Were there places where customers were like, "It's nice, but that's not my concern as to why I'm looking at buying one service over another or staying with one service over another"? I think when the cable guys first launched their five-year price guarantee, we did see a little impact on gross adds, no impact on churn. But once we launched our five-year price guarantee, we saw that impact from the cable gross adds go away completely. In fact, our gross adds went up as a result of that. So, we feel good about where we're positioned. I mentioned we've had success at the middle to high end of the market. It seems like cable has sort of gone downstream in many cases, focusing on the lower-tier customers with some of their more aggressive pricing. We're glad to stick to the higher end of the market. Staying on the topic of competition, how are currently the incumbent cable operators responding to your Glo Fiber products? Do you see any impacts from converged offers in your markets since you don't have the wireless offer bundled? Yeah. I would say for the most part, the cable competitors have been rational with their pricing. We have not seen any extreme pricing changes. They have been trying to push the bundle with the mobile service. We don't offer mobile service. We don't feel like we need to offer mobile service. Our sales team is not telling us that they need that to be effective selling. Believe me, they would scream if they thought they needed that as a product. Also, we're not seeing any churn that we can really measure to the cable companies because we don't have a wireless offering. So right now, we believe we can continue to add customers, drive penetration without having that mobile offering. Again, we think we have a superior product that competes extremely well against cable. In terms of fixed wireless, just any incremental incursions or, as these companies get more spectrum and they light it up, they have the potential to offer more service to the homes and businesses. We continue to see very limited impact from fixed wireless in our markets. I think we do have an advantage with our markets with the terrain. We have hills, mountains, large trees. It does make offering fixed wireless more difficult. We were previously a wireless network provider as a Sprint affiliate, providing mobile services, and we offer our own fixed wireless. I can tell you from experience in our markets, and particularly with mid-band spectrum where all the capacity is, it is difficult to offer fixed wireless service, particularly when the wireless guys are offering it with a device you put in your window. When we offered fixed wireless, we actually installed an antenna on the roof to get the signal in there. I think because of the terrain and the foliage, that impact has been somewhat muted for us relative to some of our peers who are in the Midwest with flat terrain or in larger cities with MDUs where you can get basically line of sight for fixed wireless into a building. What are the biggest drivers of churn today, and what is your retention strategy? In our Glo Fiber markets, biggest driver of churn is customers moving. That is again, customers moving out of the market. And in our churn numbers, we also include customers that move within our market. If you back out customers that move within our market from one address to another address, our churn is even lower. We see very low churn to competition. I think one of the reasons for that is we really focus on customer satisfaction. Every interaction that our customers have with Glo Fiber and Shentel, they have the opportunity to provide feedback through a customer satisfaction survey. Whether that is tech support, customer service, a technician visit to the home, we take those survey results very seriously and are working to constantly improve. I think we have seen the results in our Net Promoter Score. We have seen historical Net Promoter Scores in the 60 range. Compared to our competition on the cable side, we think that is much higher. When I think back to your recent history, you took a step that was a little bit of a TAM expansion relative to the resi and small business fiber, but buying some assets focused more on fiber infrastructure in Ohio. Right. You become even more broadly focused on the business segment within some of your markets and adjacencies. What are you seeing in terms of the trends and opportunities there to grow that business, expand margins? Welcome your perspective on what you are seeing, especially as we are on this early part of a journey of this AI adoption cycle. Sure. So we acquired Horizon Telcom based in Ohio in April of 2024. That basically doubled the size of our commercial fiber business. That integration has gone very well from our perspective. We had more synergies than we expected, and it has really allowed us to grow our commercial fiber business. With the larger scale, with the network now stretching over eight states, we are now able to get more attention from the wireless carriers. We see more wireless carrier opportunity now than I think either company would have seen on a standalone basis. So that is a big opportunity to continue to grow. The other big opportunity is with the data centers and the hyperscalers. We are fortunate that our network in Ohio is an area where a lot of hyperscaler data center activity is occurring. The area from Columbus down into southern Ohio, we have a lot of fiber assets there currently. We are also seeing a lot of activity in our Virginia markets. So we think we have the opportunity there to leverage our existing fiber assets, existing conduits to serve hyperscalers. We mentioned on our earnings call, we now have a master service agreement in place with one of the major hyperscalers, so we are working on our first service orders for that. So it will take some time before that shows up as impacting revenue and EBITDA, probably 12- 18 months after we sign the service order, because we, in many cases, need to construct fiber from our existing fiber routes to the data center, and in most cases, these data centers are still under construction. But I think you will see some early indicators. Quarterly, we report on our new sales bookings. I think it is likely that you will see a significant increase in those new sales bookings as we get some of these service orders in place. But we feel very good about that opportunity, and that is really an incremental vertical for us. We really have not seen revenue from that data center to data center connectivity in the past. Just one more on this. So there is all different flavors of these revenue streams coming from hyperscalers. Some of these deals where there is significant CapEx involved, the hyperscaler funds a portion or more than 100% of that CapEx. Then there is different accounting treatments as it comes through the telcos numbers. Of course, then there is recurring service, right? Selling waves or just selling things on a monthly basis and just the traditional you build it, then you charge for it. What do these revenue streams look like for your company? Is it going to be biased to one of these kind of flavors versus another? I'd say that most of the conversations we've had now so far have been about dark fiber between the data centers. We've also seen some interest in some 100 Gbps, 400 Gbps wave services as well. And what we're likely to see, there will be a non-recurring charge component to help, in our case, with construction from our existing fiber to the data center or to possibly augment some of our fiber counts along the routes. But we also expect to see an ongoing recurring charge as well as part of these deals. We'll get into free cash flow more broadly in a moment. But does this impact the free cash flow trajectory that you're on? I would say no. We've stated we target to be free cash flow positive starting in 2027. I think our data center builds that we're looking at right now, they're sort of a CapEx light approach, taking advantage of our existing fiber we already have in place. This would not be a massive capital investment for a huge new fiber route, for example. It's taking advantage of that existing fiber, maybe augmenting in some cases and building off the endpoints. Going back to the business segment. Within your current business offerings, are there any underappreciated aspects or opportunities, for example, any customer segments that could accelerate your revenue and profitability in business? I mentioned growth with the wireless carriers. I think there's an opportunity there to see incremental revenue. Also, on our small medium business in our Glo Fiber markets, I think there's an opportunity to increase revenue there. Our penetration rate now is only about 12%. We think we can grow that significantly. We have some additional sales resources that are focused on that now. Then, of course, the data center hyperscaler activity, we have additional sales resources now that are dedicated to that. I think the combination there is upside for our commercial fiber revenue. When you look at the free cash flow opportunity for 2027, what are the principal drivers that get you to that inflection to go positive? How do you weigh generating positive free cash next year or growing that in the future, relative if you're getting 15% unlevered IRRs and 20%+ levered IRRs on your capital, why not just keep pushing the builds? As far as hitting that free cash flow inflection point, it's a combination of increased revenue from our Glo Fiber business as we drive penetration, increased revenue from our commercial fiber business. We couple that with the significant decline in our capital intensity. We've been spending a lot. We've invested over $600 million building out this Glo Fiber network. As we wind the build down at the end of this year, that's going to significantly reduce our CapEx, likely cut it in more than half of what we're spending this year. Those are two factors. Also, at the end of 2025, we refinanced our debt. Most of our fiber assets and revenue now are part of an ABS. That significantly reduced our cost of capital and our interest expense. The combination of all those working together, as well as keeping our operating costs steady as we grow revenue, that's really how we get to the free cash flow positive position starting in 2027. As far as why not continue to keep building, we think in our markets for Glo Fiber expansion, there's not a whole lot of new market opportunity where there's not already a fiber provider. We don't want to go chase a larger number if we can't hit those returns. We believe there'll be some fill in in our existing markets, and all our Glo Fiber markets are growing, so there'll be growth opportunities there as those markets grow and there's additional passings constructed. But we don't see a lot of new market opportunity that's adjacent to us right now. Some of the fiber builders that are out there that are looking at these huge new passing targets, I'm not sure where they're going to come from unless they're willing to build in areas that already have a significant amount of fiber. How do you think about M&A? As regional fiber consolidation continues, do you see yourself more as a buyer or a seller? What's your view on target size, geography, or financial profile? How has that evolved? I do think there will continue to be consolidation in the industry. We could certainly position ourselves as a buyer. We think there's opportunity for some of the smaller regional fiber companies that are adjacent to us. We could add them to our Glo Fiber network and our ABS facility. If it's a smaller number of passings within our existing states that we operate, we would be interested. If we have to jump to a new state, for example, or a couple of states away, we would need at least 100,000 passings to make that make sense. But we want to stay reasonably within the same geography we operate today. We've been very selective in our markets. The majority of our markets are connected to our fiber backbone, and we feel like we can operate that network efficiently. We would not want to go jump across the country to a new region. We want to stay in a similar region. But with our size, we feel we're positioned to continue to be a long-term operator, but there's always the opportunity for consolidation, and our board would certainly evaluate that. We want to do what's best in the interest of our long-term shareholders. And how should investors think about how you're going to balance debt reduction, M&A opportunities, CapEx, and shareholder returns? Well, I mentioned CapEx comes down significantly. Our capital intensity, we're projecting between 25% and 30% next year. When we think about that, Glo Fiber's about 25% capital intensity because we're still adding customers, adding new fiber drops to the network, and in commercial fiber business, that's capital intensive because that's really success-based. So that'll be probably 30% and declining over time as our business scales. But as we generate more free cash flow, we will certainly be opportunistic with acquisition opportunities, and we would look to really reduce our highest cost of capital. So we have preferred stock that we would look at, and then also a revolving credit facility on our incumbent business. We would look to reduce that as well. So your company's in one of these really unique positions where I'm kind of curious how it works when you're in your operational meetings, because you have the role in some markets of being incumbent and having to respond to insurgency, then you've got the other side where you're the insurgent. Right. You're just looking to win over the incumbents. You might uniquely be able to answer this question, which is: Is there a long-term equilibrium where both sides, at some future point, can grow? Because that's the big concern, right? Is there an equilibrium for cable, or where does the insurgency go, and how durable, sustainable that is. So when you look at these two different sides of the business and different strategies and competitive responses, what's your conviction that there's a future state where both sides are going to be okay? I do think there's still runway with cable. In our cable markets, they're primarily rural, low density. We have limited competition compared to our larger cable peers. So I think there's runway there. I do think we hit an equilibrium point, but I do think fiber's going to have the advantage. Fiber's going to have a larger share of the market because I do believe it is a superior technology. Do customers appreciate that today? Just anecdotally, whenever I have conversations about people who have friends, family who have broadband, if you are in the industry, I think everyone appreciates performance and speed. Is that appreciated that there is a difference? Also, again, unique position of seeing both sides. As cable upgrades to DOCSIS 4.0 and potentially beyond, does that just mitigate any of the variances? Well, I continue to think fiber will be the superior platform in terms of speed, latency, and reliability. With the fiber networks, there is no electronic equipment between that POP site, which is backed up with generators and battery in the customer home. Even going to DOCSIS 4.0, there is still other equipment in there, and it creates a reliability issue. I think fiber will certainly have the advantage there long term. Thank you for joining us today. It is great to see you. Thank you. Take care. Appreciate the opportunity. Thanks.