Shenandoah Telecommunications Co

third 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 Shintel.

Good morning and thank you for joining us. The purpose of today's call is to review Shintel's results for the third 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.chentel.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. You're cautioned 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 hope everyone is well. Today we're planning to discuss our third quarter financial and operating results, excluding the results and impact of the Horizon Telecom transaction we announced last week, unless expressly noted. Our respective teams are very excited about this transformative combination and have already started work on obtaining the necessary approvals and doing early stage planning for the upcoming integration. We will have more to share in future earnings calls. I'll now turn to the highlights of our third quarter results. We continue to make solid progress in executing our Glow Fiber growth plan. As noted on slide four, we added almost 20,000 new Glow Fiber passings in the third quarter. We increased passings 55% year over year and crossed the 200,000 milestone during the quarter. Our Glow Fiber passings are now almost the size of our cable market passings. As we approach our fourth quarter of launching our first glow fiber market in November, we will have doubled the size for our broadband business in terms of passing. With the rise in telecom acquisition expected to close in 2024 and accelerated construction anticipated across all of our markets, we expect to double the broadband passings again by the end of 2026. Moving to slide five, Our sales team added over 4,500 Glowfiber data subscribers in the third quarter and has grown the Glowfiber customer base by 77% over the past year. Similar to the high growth in broadband passings, we've grown total broadband data subscribers by 78% since the third quarter of 2019. Our track record over the past four years provides confidence for us to grow our broadband data subscriber base at similar growth rates in the next three to four years as we expand our Glowfiber network. As reflected in slide six, the growth in broadband data subscribers has driven a steady expansion of our consolidated adjusted EBITDA margin year over year since 2019 when we launched Glowfiber. The key catalysts for the margin improvement are the combination of extremely scalable fiber networks, which are driving incremental high-speed data gross margins of more than 80%, and our ability to gain scale in our selling general and administrative expenses. We expect margins to continue to expand as we execute our Glowfiber growth plan and close on our acquisition of Horizon. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jim to review the details of our financial results.