Uniti Group Inc.

Good morning and welcome to today's conference call to discuss the first quarter 2026 Unity's Group Earnings Conference Call. My name is Michelle and I'll be your operator for today. Today's call is being recorded and a webcast will be available on the company's investor relations website, investor.unity.com, beginning today and will remain available for 365 days. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Participants on the call will have the opportunity to ask questions following the company's prepared comments. It is now my pleasure to introduce Bill Tottolio, Unity Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury. Please begin.

Thanks, Michelle. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining today's conference call to discuss Unity's first quarter 2026 results. Speaking on the call today will be Kenny Gunderman, our CEO, and Paul Bullington, Unity's CFO. John Harabin, president of Kinetic, will also be joining us this morning during Q&A. Before we get started, I would like to quickly cover our safe harbor statement. Please note that today's remarks may contain forward-looking statements. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding Unity's fiber build strategy, the business's growth potential, our 2026 outlook, and other statements that are not historical facts. Numerous factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. For more information on those factors, please see the section titled Safe Harbor Statement in the accompanying presentation and the risk factors sections in our filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Ken.

Thanks, Bill. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining. Unity is off to a great start in 2026, and we're executing well on our strategy as the premier insurgent fiber provider. We have a terrific embedded fiber base and are aggressively building more fiber to future-proof our network. We're continuously elevating our game from an operational excellence perspective, and we're putting the customer first by being customer obsessed. For many years and continuing through today, we've been building fiber first or early into Tier 2 and 3 markets and that strategy has proven successful. We are consistently growing traditional wholesale and enterprise fiber revenue at 10% to 15%, and now consumer fiber revenue at over 20% with an insurgent share-taker mentality. Having fiber in unique locations is also advantageous from a long-haul wholesale perspective, as we've been selling less competitive but increasingly desired routes. Sometimes it's better to be fortunate than smart, and our footprint happens to be located in or near markets that have power and land availability, which is giving us an outsized opportunity to build for the AI revolution. Fiber is clearly viewed as a mission-critical asset in a way that has never been before. Plus, in an increasingly converged world where there is less and less white space to build fiber first, our footprint and network grow in strategic significance every day. Our business is being fueled by twin engines, including the fiber-to-the-home build at Kinetic and the hyperscaler AI build at Fiber Infrastructure. We are well positioned strategically, and we have the right assets, plan, and team in place going forward. We demonstrated strong results in the first quarter by executing on that strategy. Total fiber revenue grew 15% year-over-year, fiber revenue at Fiber Infrastructure grew 13%, and we had that had the third highest quarter of bookings ever at fiber infrastructure. At Kinetic, we had the strongest quarter ever of gross ads and the highest number of homes constructed in nearly four years. Importantly, and back to my comments about being customer obsessed, we had the best quarter of consumer fiber churn ever at Kinetic. As highlighted on slide five, our priorities have not changed for the year. Despite some unprecedented winter storm activity during the first quarter, we're well on our way to ramping our Fiber to the Home build at Kinetic, targeting 450,000 to 500,000 new homes with fiber in 2026. In fact, we built 45,000 new homes in March and another 45,000 new homes in April. In fiber infrastructure, we're continuing to benefit from all of the tailwinds driving wholesale fiber, including fiber to the home, mobile wireless, satellite, and, of course, hyperscaler and generative AI demand. For the hyperscalers, we foreshadowed even more activity in 2026 than last year, and thus far, our expectations have been exceeded. Importantly, we are continuing to show solid lease-up on our new hyperscaler builds, demonstrating our discipline in making investments in this space. At Unity Solutions, we're seeing growing success in cross-selling products into our on-net fiber base at Unity Fiber and Kinetics. Today we estimate our managed services attachment rate to be below 0.1 times at Unity Fiber, and we think it could be materially higher over time. Lastly, as Paul will comment on later, the ABS opportunity to fund our business cost efficiently also continues to grow. 2026 is an important inflection year for Unity, and in particular is a critical investment year at Kinetic. As such, showing progress towards key goals is critical. and we previously committed to some milestones as highlighted on slide six to demonstrate that progress. We achieved our first milestone during the fourth quarter of greater than 50% of Kinetics subs now on Fiverr. And in April, we achieved our second milestone of greater than 50% of Kinetics consumer revenues on Fiverr. We remain very confident in the remainder of our milestones, including achieving consolidated revenue and EBITDA growth in 2027. Slide 7 shows we're well on our way to 3.5 million homes passed with fiber and 1.25 million fiber subs by the end of 2029. And we're also closer to 90% of our revenue coming from our core business. We are laser focused on operational excellence, customer obsession, intensely growing our fiber business, and executing on our strategy of building fiber into unique locations, including overbuilding legacy networks and moving customers onto our own fiber. All of this, combined with aggressively managing out of legacy services, will lead to growth. As I mentioned earlier, kinetic consumer fiber churn was a bright spot for the quarter, as highlighted on slide 8. We were very candid when our merger closed that consumer fiber churn was too high and was going to be a big focus area. We followed through on that promise and expect there's room for further improvement. We believe with the various actions we've taken today, plus future planned actions, we will bring kinetic fiber churn down to industry-leading levels, just like those we've had at Unity for years. We're also using best practices brought over from Frontier, Ziply, and others led by John Horovitz's team. Managing churn effectively is a team effort, and we've actually made it a company-wide metric for our incentive bonus plan as a result. Turning to fiber infrastructure on slide nine, the opportunity in wholesale fiber right now is generational in nature, and we're extremely well positioned with the right strategy, leadership, assets to capture our share in both dark fiber and waves. There has never been a better time to be a wholesale fiber provider. Although we are building substantial amounts of new fiber, especially for the hyperscalers, we're doing it in profitably We're doing it profitably, and our scaled national footprint gives us terrific lease-up potential, driving our blended anchor lease-up yields to 35%. Importantly, although we're building some attractive new greenfield routes for hyperscalers, close to 80% of our hyperscaler business actually includes selling all or at least partial existing infrastructure. As such, the combined IRRs on the hyperscaler deals sold to date is approximately 30%. As I mentioned last quarter, we expect to build approximately 6,000 new route miles of fiber, and we expect to get close to a billion of cumulative non-recurring cash revenue by 2028. Over the next three years, a meaningful portion of our economics is supported by executed contracts, including 100% of the economics included in our 2026 guidance. On the other side of this three-year time horizon, we not only expect more fiber bills to come, but importantly, we expect to really ramp the lease up of these bills. This will lead to additional non-recurring cash revenue and up to $500 million of recurring annual cash revenue. As a result, we expect to achieve a total return on our capital of two to four times. We've often stated that the current build phase for hyperscalers is exciting, but we have also said that the inference phase is the most exciting. When the inference phase fully ramps, a more expansive group of customers will be using AI and will need highly reliable, low-latency, ultra-high bandwidth connectivity, and the mission-critical advantages of fiber will really rise above all other technologies. Fixed wireless, LEO, and even cable remain somewhat competitive today at the edge. But over time, that will dissipate. Customers large and small will demand fiber at the edge which brings into focus our 5 million connected endpoints and provides us an opportunity to win back share from these other technologies. All of this edge demand will drive substantially more traffic onto our wholesale network. As such, we are not only working hard to prepare for the inference phase by building fiber to more homes and businesses, as well as upgrading our towers and small cells, But importantly, we're preparing to become more of a share taker in the Waves market. As illustrated on slide 11, the Waves market is projected to grow at close to 10% a year, and we believe that could be conservative. Unity has less than 5% Waves market share today, which is similar to our other fiber products where we are an insurgent share taker. We recently launched FastWaves, a product which has substantially faster turn-up intervals than we've had in the past. We're not enabling waves capability all across the country. We're being selective about where we light waves, and we're focusing on routes that are unique to Unity that give us a competitive advantage. These routes are particularly enhanced by the unique build cycle that we're currently undertaking for the hyperscalers. As we complete long-haul builds that connect Tier 2 and 3 markets, We expect the hyperscalers to be increasingly large wave customers, eventually pivoting away from the current dark fiber intensive build cycle and becoming more regular wave customers. As an example, and we think a leading indicator, in May we sold a 20 terabit wave package for a hyperscaler, the single largest lit bandwidth order in Unity's history. And there are an increasing number of deals like this in our sales funnel. With that, I'll turn the call over to Paul.