Shenandoah Telecommunications Co

Morning, everyone. Welcome to Shenandoah Telecommunications' first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Kirk Andrews, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis for Shentel. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. The purpose of today's call is to review Shentel's results for first quarter 2023. Our results were announced in a press release distributed this morning, and the presentation we'll be reviewing is included on the investor page at our website, www.shintels.com. Please note that an audio replay of this call will be made available later today. The details are set forth in the press release announcing this call. With us on the call today are Chris French, President and Chief Executive Officer, Ed McKay, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, and Jim Volk, Senior Vice President of Finance and CFO. After our prepared remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session. As always, let me refer you to slide two of the presentation, which contains our safe harbor disclaimer, and remind you that this conference call may include forward-looking statements subject to certain risks and uncertainties. These may cause our actual results to differ materially from the statements. Therefore, we have provided a detailed discussion of various risk factors in our SEC filings, which you are encouraged to review. Your caution is not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Chris. Go ahead, Chris.

Thanks, Kirk. We appreciate everyone joining us this morning, and I hope everyone is staying healthy and safe. We're off to a great start in 2023. As noted on slide four, we had a record quarter for our broadband segment driven by Glowfiber results. Glowfiber net customer additions were just over 4,500 in the first quarter, 87% higher than the first quarter 2022 and setting a quarterly record. Customer net additions benefited from the accelerating network expansion over the past few quarters. Glowfiber revenue more than doubled to 7 million in the first quarter, also a new high when compared to the same period a year ago, and was the primary driver in achieving an all-time high for quarterly broadband segment revenue and adjusted EBITDA. We're beginning to see the operating leverage and margin expansion in our broadband business as Glow Fiber accelerates growth and achieves scale. We now have a critical mass of Glow Fiber markets with construction substantially complete where we can drive up gross margins as we add customers with very little incremental network expense. We have a substantial opportunity to grow revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and margins over the next few years as we increase our penetration rate from 17% to our target penetration rate of 38%. Moving to slide five for an update on construction and customer growth. We added over 17,000 new Glowfiber passings in the first quarter and have increased passing 76% year-over-year to over 165,000 passings. Our sales team has more than kept pace with our construction team, with Glowfiber customers growing 109% to almost 29,000 by the end of March. Ed will provide more details on both our Glowfiber network construction and customer growth later in the call. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jim to review the details of our financial results.