Before we begin, disclosures are available at the registration desk. For those of you I haven't met, I'm Michael Rollins, and I cover communication services and infrastructure for Citi. Very pleased to welcome back Kenny Gunderman, CEO of Uniti. Kenny, thank you so much for joining us this morning. It's a pleasure to be here, Michael. Thank you for having us, as always. Well, it's great to see you. As I think back, it's been, what, like, a year now since you closed the Windstream deal. Back then, you set out a very detailed set of objectives for Uniti, and I'm curious if you could give us an update on how you're progressing against your key milestones that you have established for the company. Absolutely. We are about one month past our one-year anniversary, so good memory, Michael, and appreciate you holding us accountable to what we promised then versus what we've delivered on. We said at the time the merger would make us the premier insurgent fiber provider, which really, to us, meant that we were a large fiber provider, where scale matters in the fiber business. We have 250,000 route miles of fiber across the country and over 2 million fiber-to-the-home customers, and both of those are growing at a rapid clip. So we think we've achieved the goal of achieving scale in the fiber business. But insurgent's important because we want to be small enough that we're nimble enough to continue to outmaneuver our larger competitors. That's very important to us in a highly competitive environment like fiber is. We also promised to clean up the complicated capital structure and MLA relationship that existed between Uniti and Windstream and was a real deterrent on our cost to capital. We promised to clean that up collapse the debt silos, and as a result, our cost to capital has improved dramatically. Our cost of debt alone has improved 600 basis points, and we think we've delivered on that. We talked about removing the operational complexity of that MLA relationship and really untethering our teams towards growth. We've not only done that, we've unlocked over $100 million of true operational synergies, so we've hit that goal. We also talked about, at the time, and this seemed a little bit fanciful at the time, but we talked about the real benefit of bringing together the Windstream wholesale business with the Uniti wholesale business and how that would position us really well to capture the hyperscaler and AI investment opportunity. Boy, we're really proven right on that one, and I can't wait to talk more about that today. That's been a terrific success for us. We talked about really ramping the build at Kinetic. Prior to the merger, Windstream had really slowed the fiber to the home build, but we felt it was a strategic imperative to ramp that materially, to get ahead of any over-builders and just get ahead of the build cycle that we saw coming, and we're certainly in the middle of. We've ramped that build materially. This last quarter, we built over 140,000 homes, and we're now building 50,000 homes a month, so that run rate is exactly where we want to be. We talked about how the merger would put us on our front foot from an M&A perspective, and how in the past, the two companies separately had been sort of reactive to M&A, and it was challenging. But with the merger, we knew that it would put us on our front foot. Despite our inability to talk about that publicly, the reality is we are making great progress there, too. All that to say, I think we have delivered on what we promised, and we are continuing to execute every day. I think over the next 12, 18, 24 months, you are going to continue to see terrific execution on our part. Great. That gives us a lot to unpack this morning. Maybe just to start off, you mentioned we are going to see more over the next 18- 24 months. So what are the key milestones that investors should be looking out for as you look out over that period? Well, first of all, it is very important to us to set goals that we either hit or exceed, so we give our guidance. I talk about the vanity metrics of revenue and EBITDA, but we also talk about the less exciting metrics of homes passed and penetration and churn, bookings. I think critically important will be that you continue to see us building roughly 50,000 homes a month at Kinetic, and we have been executing on that. When you extrapolate that number, that gets you to 600,000 homes on an annual basis, which is well in excess of what we have guided towards. As you know, we have guided to 475,000 - 525,000 for the rest of the year. That is exactly where we want to be, a place where we can ramp the build engine higher if we want to, so it becomes more of a capital allocation question than it is a build engine question. Secondly, you continue to look for progression and improvement in penetration levels at Kinetic. We've stated 40% as our goal, terminal penetration goal, and we're currently at around 29%, so we're progressively tracking towards that, including when you look at our most recent cohorts, one-year anniversary of those cohorts, around 35%. So we're really doing extremely well there. We've talked about bringing down fiber churn to what we think could be, should be industry-leading levels. I've said many times you can't sell your way out of a bad churn number, and continue to believe that, so we're going to continue to focus on bringing churn down. And continue to look at strong bookings from fiber infrastructure. So we just posted a record quarter of bookings, $2.2 million of MRR, which is I think 30% better than any previous quarter. That number will ebb and flow as it does in a wholesale fiber business. But over a multi-quarter period of time, you should continue to see that number tick up as well as we continue to take our share of a substantially growing fiber infrastructure opportunity set. And maybe just to dig deeper on two of those quick things, and then we'll come back to a higher level. Starting backwards, the $2.2 million of MRR, does that include or exclude some of these large fiber wholesale deals that you're winning and going after? It largely excludes those. When we show a one-time revenue or EBITDA effect in a quarter, that is not picked up in bookings. Only MRR is what's shown in our bookings. However, we do show dark fiber in our bookings. You do have some element of MAR in our bookings, but it's not the one-time revenue or EBITDA that we sometimes report. With that said, the hyperscalers only represented 10% of our bookings for that quarter, for second quarter. The $2.2 million, the hyperscalers actually represented a pretty small percentage of that number, which is part of what excites me about the quarter. We had such a diversified mix of customers in the quarter, which we may get into later. I know everyone likes to talk about the hyperscalers, and we do too, but it was really only 10% of the total for the quarter. Right. The other thing, you said 35% penetration. Is that in a single year you're getting 35% penetration, or is that over a few years you're getting that in some of your markets already? That's within one year of a cohort built less than a year ago. That's terrific penetration in a very short period of time in our most recent cohorts. Which is- And even before that, Michael, as you know, our early cohorts were showing mid-20% penetration which is also very good. But as part of the merger, we brought in a new leadership team at Kinetic with a true insurgent mentality, a share taker mentality. And we've really started to see the effects of that team as they've ramped in the past six months or so. So maybe, actually, we'll add the order that I was going to focus on. Just given the progress that you're making in both of these businesses, maybe we'll just spend a little more time on each of these and maybe just sticking with Kinetic for another couple of minutes. With Kinetic, you're doing really well, it sounds like, with the penetration, with the builds. One of the things that we're seeing in the broadband market right now is that ARPUs for the category just seem to be softening a little bit. The question is, for you guys, as you look at what your performance is and what you're seeing in the industry, is this a function that the consumer's just having a tougher time to keep pushing price and mix of tiers of speed? Is it just competition of you guys wanting to get to your end destination more quickly, so there's a little more discounting along the way? What are you seeing, and what does this mean for pricing power in broadband over time? Yeah, great question and hugely important topic. Look, we came into the year expecting a competitive environment. We thought really for two reasons. One, the wireless carriers, especially AT&T and Verizon, have been talking a lot about convergence. Really, what does that mean? Convergence means a lot of really great, exciting things from a strategic point of view. I'm happy to talk about that too. Yeah. But as an operator, what it means is they're discounting their fiber to the home product to pull in wireless. Right? They've been very vocal about how that drives greater penetration for wireless, and it drives lower churn. But it means lower fiber pricing, right? I think you've also seen the big cable providers looking for a defensible line of retreat, right? They've been losing a lot of broadband subs over the past 12, 18 months, and they're using creative promos, they're using creative giveaways, and that also effectively results in lower broadband pricing. We anticipated that. We didn't know exactly what the moves would be, but we anticipated that environment. As a result, we've seen lower ARPU. So to your question, lower ARPU, largely driven by competitive pressures. We've historically had a higher ARPU than most in the industry, as you know, Michael, and we sacrificed some of that ARPU in the first half of the year to retain customers. We gave away some retention credits. We gave away some other things to save our base, thinking that this competitive turmoil right now is temporary. We really do think it is. As we look at the second half of the year, I think we've already started to see some stabilization across some of the competitors. We've seen some price ups from some of the folks I just mentioned, and we think that's going to continue to stabilize in the second half of the year. For us, we've got an increasing amount of value-added services to sell. We've just rolled out YouTube TV. We've got always-on Wi-Fi. We've got some more added features coming on the security side in particular. We also have less than 50% of our base that's taking one gig. We've got a terrific upsell opportunity. Ultimately, and very importantly, our team is now fully in place and functioning. In the first half of the year, it really wasn't. We were still putting pieces in place, putting our systems in place. But in the second half of the year, we now have AI monitoring all of our calls, incoming and out, so we've got the ability to refine our scripts. We've got the ability to refine our offerings. Back to the insurgent mentality. Yeah. We have the ability to be a lot more nimble than our competitors. I do think it's going to continue to be competitive, and I think it's going to be competitive on price, but I think there's going to be an increasing stabilization in the industry, and we're going to have the ability to continue to be nimble and I hope outmaneuver our competitors. I think very importantly, though, we also have a superior product. We do have the superior broadband product, whether you're competing against cable or fixed wireless or LEO, and that gives us an advantage. In our markets, as you know Michael, they're less competitive. They're smaller. They're tier 2, they're tier 3. We compete against big cable in less than 50% of our markets. That's substantially less than most. We don't compete against AT&T and Verizon at all on the wireline side. We've got a really good competitive environment. We've got the right team in place. Now we have the right systems in place. I feel really good about our ability to compete. That's one of the things that I remember just about historic Windstream, right? Is just that they're competing in these- Yeah less populated areas. Right. Less competition. What about Starlink? What are you seeing from them as they're boosting broadband capacity, and do you think they'll move to more of a price-based approach? Are you seeing any evidence of that, and how do you compete against them? Starlink is a great customer of ours. Again, we're a wholesale fiber provider in addition to being a residential broadband provider, so they're a terrific customer of ours. I think they're going to continue to be a great customer and a growing customer over time. We're a little bit hedged against that competitive threat. I'd say probably substantially hedged. We have definitely seen a leaning in from their perspective leading up to and around their IPO. From a promo perspective and from a pricing perspective, I'm sure that was designed. We saw a little bit of that in the first half of the year, and we were public about that. We also have a build plan, as you know, that's aggressive, and we're ramping it quickly. That build plan is intentionally designed to build into markets where we have a potential competitive threat from overbuilders, fiber overbuilders, or from cable. Our build today is not tooled towards competing against LEO. We are not viewing LEO or fixed wireless as a long-term competitive threat. As a result, we are leaving our flank a little bit exposed, if you will, to those two products. We are losing a little bit more to both of those than we are to cable or to fiber overbuilders. I would take that trade-off all day long, because as we move forward, when we do build fiber into these markets, we have the ability to take back share from LEO and take back share from fixed wireless. Because I do think, as we have now gotten further and further from the IPO, you are starting to see more stabilization in how Starlink is approaching the market. It is an expensive product, right? It is more expensive than fiber. You do have to buy the equipment. I think over time, we have got an ability to compete very effectively against LEO. Pivoting over to the fiber infrastructure business. We were just talking earlier, so you have kind of these two components, this recurring MRR business, and then some of these larger hyperscale opportunities. Can you frame the growth opportunities from each? I know you have in your guidance, right, some expectations for significant bookings and flow-through. I think on the earnings call you may have mentioned some of that could actually maybe be early 2027. Maybe give us an update on fiber growth, the wholesale opportunity, and the timing. Yeah, I love this topic. For I would say maybe two years, maybe a little more than two years, we have been getting the question about what is the opportunity set for AI and the hyperscalers. What does it look like for you as a fiber company? We have been struggling to estimate that. We have stopped trying. Our last stated estimate of the opportunity set for fiber companies from hyperscalers in the AI build is $20 billion for network providers, fiber network providers today. We stated that we thought- Is that national? Yes, national, across the U.S. We stated that we thought that number could grow to $75 billion in five years, so pretty dramatic growth. I would say that number, those estimates are probably well over a year old. I would say they're conservative. When you look at what we have stated publicly about our opportunity set, we said in 2026 through 2028, there would be a build cycle of building to large language model data centers, and we thought we could capture about $1.5 billion of that opportunity. These are one-time revenue and EBITDA opportunities. Those are what we consider anchor customers, building new opportunities, new greenfield fiber in strategic locations around our network. So connecting markets where we have an existing presence, building off of those markets. We think that's a terrific opportunity for us because the hyperscalers are looking to be in markets like Mobile, Alabama, or Shreveport, Louisiana, or Jackson, Mississippi, or Little Rock, Arkansas. Not New York City, right? So where we are, where our network is. We felt very confident about achieving that. Off of that $1.5 billion anchor build, we said we could get to $500 million of recurring revenue over a period of time. That would be. On top on top of that. That's the MRR. Those are those mega Waves packages that we started to talk about publicly, and we said that we're starting to see that sooner than we expected. That's kind of the pull-in that you're referencing, Michael, that we're now seeing 15 terabit Wave packages and 20 terabit Wave packages and on and on and on. And those Waves packages are on top of those builds that we're executing on and that we expect to do over the next couple of years. When you put all that together, that math suggests a terrific upside opportunity for us, and it represents about 10% of the TAM that I described. To me, there's no reason why that 10% shouldn't be 20%. Because we're competing against two or three other large wholesale fiber providers in the country, and we do believe the hyperscalers like to go back to proven providers. When I consider that the TAM that I expressed appears to be conservative, Yep seems to be growing each day, that we appear to be executing on the pull-in, the lease-up sooner than expected, and that our stated market share is roughly 10% when I think it could be higher, I feel like there's a lot of terrific opportunity there for us. And just thinking about this out loud for a minute with you. The billion and a half, if I remember correctly, that's contract value. Correct. That's over 20 years. So it's really like, if you broke that into an MAR or just like a economic value, it'd be like $75 million a year. But the $500 million is a recurring opportunity. So the multiple opportunity on the incremental business seems much more significant than the initial. Correct. I'm curious if you could share some of the opportunities that are driving that multiple of difference between a hyperscaler, but then all of the businesses that you serve in these regions. Yeah. Well, first of all, I think your math is directionally right. I think that billion and a half is close to contract value. It's really just the one-time revenue that associated with a dark fiber build, but then there is additional O&M associated with that over time that's not captured in that 1.5. But as you know, the O&M is a smaller part. So it's- Good margin. It's terrific margin, and we love it, but it doesn't move the needle too much. I just want to clarify that. Yeah. Your question directionally, though, is spot on, which is that $500 million of lease-up is substantially. That's what we're working towards. The $1.5 billion build is good business, and we're building strategic network that 70%-80% of that is funded through NRCs from the hyperscalers. We've stated that publicly too. A large percentage of the build is funded by our customers. That's terrific business. We want to do more of it. That $500 million of recurring revenue is the real play, and that $500 million, to be clear, is really just the AI driven lease-up. That's coming from the neo clouds, the superscalers, the hyperscalers. That doesn't include the true inference opportunity that we see, which is all of us using AI on our iPhones and therefore driving demand on small cells or towers or our hopefully 3.5 million homes passed with fiber, not only needing one gig service, but now needing two gig service to provide AI to the home. Which by the way, blows LEO and fixed wireless out of the water, right? Because they can't get anywhere near those speeds or those latencies. That opportunity is not captured in any of the numbers we've talked about. I think that's one of the reasons that we're really excited about the next number of years of opportunity in our fiber business. It's also why I love to see a diversified mix of customers in our bookings at Fiber because 10% hyperscalers, 20% neo cloud, 20% superscalers. The other 50% is wireless carriers, and it's fiber to the home providers, and it's international ISPs that are driving demand that they see coming across their fiber to the home footprints or their wireless footprints. I think all of that's just going to ramp in the coming years. One more question on this, and then we're going to get into the asset conversation. Your returns. You've been describing very healthy returns or marginal returns on these fiber deals that you're getting. Some of your competitors, especially for the initial business, have had significantly lower returns. It's not unusual, mid to upper single digit returns on the initial deal just to get the anchor, and then everything else could be much better incrementally. What's driving your success with marginal returns, and is it sustainable as you're going after that $1.5 billion initial set from the hyperscalers? Yeah, I can't comment on our competitors too much. I could, but I won't. Look, for us, our playbook in the past has always been to target 5%-10% anchor yields, cash flow yields, and then grow those with lease-up beyond that. Prior to the AI build cycle, and we've stated each quarter what our metrics are. Yeah. Our actuals. Prior to the AI build, we were at 6% anchor yields, so right in that range. Our blended lease-up yields, inclusive of anchor, were at 37%. So 37% cash flow yields on our pre-AI build model. We applied that same discipline to the AI build cycle. As a result, we knew there were going to be deals that we wouldn't pursue or we wouldn't take on because they didn't fit within the parameters. But what we have accepted are deals that are actually contiguous to our existing network, and we've actually stated that 80% of our hyperscaler builds have actually been either connected to our on-existing infrastructure. That means only 20% of the builds have been true greenfields. I think that in and of itself is the answer to your question. But if you start to unpack that, we also estimated initially that roughly 70% of those builds would be funded through NRCs. That number's been tracking higher, and I think it's going to continue to track higher, which means those anchor yields are well in excess of that 5%-10% range. They're to the point where we don't even report the yields on those deals because they're not measurable. We're reporting the IRRs on those deals. Our anchor IRRs are at over 20% on the anchor deals. And inclusive of lease-up on top of those anchor deals, we're now showing close to 35% IRRs on a blended basis. But I think ultimately, the real answer to your question, Michael, is we're not pursuing builds that are not contiguous to our network. We're pursuing builds that are in or around our network. As I mentioned earlier, we just happen to have network in the right places. We have network over the years that we've built in tier 2 and tier 3 markets in the Southeast. Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas. These are markets where the hyperscalers want to be and we're building off of preexisting network, which really gives us a cost advantage and a speed to build advantage. Right. In terms of the assets, you've got three businesses that arguably could go their separate ways over time, and you have some non-core assets. What's happening in terms of the explorations of trying to find the best homes and the best value for all of your assets? Yeah. We were very candid when we announced the merger and since then about our willingness and ability to pursue M&A on our front foot struggling with that metaphor. We've done that. We set up our businesses to be modular. Fiber infrastructure, Uniti Solutions, and Kinetic really through that lens to be able to pursue M&A strategically and I would say that was the right decision. I will not update any further than that on the broader strategic conversation, but I would just say that was the right decision, and I feel very pleased with the progress we have made there. We have also talked about non-core asset sales of $500 million- $1 billion. These are just assets that are generating very little EBITDA. or if any EBITDA, that are within the portfolio. This is spectrum assets that are not being used. These are fiber assets that are not contiguous to the core network, for example, that may be in regions of the country that are never going to be core to our business. These may be assets that are corporate real estate, for example. Kinetic is an old ILEC at its core, and so there is just thousands of square feet of real estate around the country or acres of real estate around the country that is monetizable. There is operational real estate that is monetizable. Then there is also probably markets at Kinetic and other places where we have assets, but we are not going to build fiber anytime soon. When you think about those assets, there is half a billion to a billion of opportunity for us to monetize those to help us fund our build with little to no impact on EBITDA, and we are making terrific progress on that. We told folks to expect a 12- 36 month period of time to see some monetizations. As I have been reminding people recently, we are not yet at that 12-month period. We said that at the beginning of the year, that the 12-month period would start in March of 2027. I am confident that by then, and certainly after, you will start to see some announcements there. These are things for 2027, 2028. Correct. Not for 2026. I don't want to be too Yeah definitive about timelines, but just think about it over that 12 - 36 month period of time. So maybe just a speed round on this for just a moment because we only have a couple of minutes left. With your Kinetic assets, is there any concern from private equity and possible buyers of those types of assets? Is there any pause or paralysis of people figuring out fixed wireless, Starlink, that all these developments in the last couple of years is just freezing a little bit of that market, relative to the converged strategics who I think clearly have a different perspective of how they're leveraging, as you mentioned earlier, fiber for their mobile business? Yeah, it's a great question, and I can't put myself into the head of everyone or others, but to speculate a little bit, I think certainly no paralysis, but I think pause is a fair word. I don't think that the industry, and when I talk to other operators in the space and when I hear them speak publicly about Starlink, the reality is Starlink's a good product. But it's always been a good product. Just because they went public doesn't mean they're more of a competitive threat. It just means all of you are more focused on it, and you should be. But when I look at our original model versus today, our competitive threat to LEO is about what we thought it would be. Our competitive threat to fixed wireless is probably higher. But our number of overbuilders coming into our market is also less. I would take that trade-off all day long. I think LEO is going to continue to be something that we have to respond to each quarter, because you now have them speaking publicly each quarter. But I don't think the overarching competitive threat is any different. If anything, I think it actually puts more value on fiber to the home, because that's one product that is indisputably better than LEO. Fixed wireless, maybe not. Cable, maybe not. Mobile wireless, maybe not. But fiber is an indisputably better product. Ultimately, I think the conclusion from a strategic point of view is you need more of that, not less. On fiber infrastructure, the public markets have had a tougher time valuing fiber infrastructure business models for the last several years. Are you seeing that as a contagion into the private markets? I think that when investors look at our business, whether public or private, they want to see a TAM or an opportunity that is believable and understandable. I think that is true of the hyperscaler and the AI opportunity. I think it is largely accepted as a terrific opportunity. Secondly, people want to see execution. In the past, many fiber businesses have not executed, and they have not executed because they have not embraced the shared infrastructure model, so the lease-up model. There has been too much anchor build only and no follow-through, and I think we have demonstrated the ability to follow through on the shared infrastructure, as we talked about earlier. Thirdly, the quality of our assets and where they are is super important. When I make the point about we have network where the hyperscalers want to be, that is a believable point. I think, yeah, there is always skepticism towards any business. The fiber industry has been through some cycles, as you know well, Michael. But ultimately, when you approach the issues with facts like we have, I think we have got a terrific story. Kenny, thank you very much. Great. Thank you, Michael. Great to see you. Thank you.