Good morning, and welcome to the Cogent Communications Holdings Third Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded, and it will be available for replay at www.cogentco.com. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Dave Schaeffer, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Cogent Communications Holdings. You may begin.

Hey, thank you, and good morning to everyone. Welcome to our third quarter 2020 earnings conference call. I'm Dave Schaeffer, Cogent's Chief Executive Officer. With me on this morning's call is Sean Wallace, our Chief Financial Officer. We continue to believe in the long-term strength of our business, the growing importance and breadth of our network and the increasing profitability of our operations. We also remain confident in the importance of our products and services to our customer base, which continues to utilize Cogent's Internet services for their mission-critical operations. Fundamentally, the interconnectivity and volume of traffic among businesses, service providers, carriers and data centers continues to grow at extremely high rates. And we operate important infrastructure that supports that growth. As discussed in previous earnings calls, our churn remains within historical averages and we are not seeing any significant changes to our customer base. However, we are continuing to see new and existing customers take a cautious approach to new configurations and upgrades as well as continued reduction in demand for services at smaller satellite offices for our corporate customers. We continue to see challenges and uncertainties related to incremental sales directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our third quarter revenues grew sequentially at 0.9% to $142.3 million and increased 3.9% on a year-over-year basis. On a constant currency basis, we experienced quarterly revenue decline of 0.2% and achieved a year-over-year quarterly revenue growth on a constant currency basis of 3.1%. We continue to operate an efficient network, which serves a growing number of markets, buildings within those markets and is able to handle the continued growth in traffic volume on our network. Our non-GAAP gross profit grew by 0.8% sequentially and 7.5% year-over-year despite a modest decline in margins. Our non-GAAP gross margin improved by 200 basis points…

Thank you, Dave, and good morning to everyone. This earnings conference call includes forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on our current intent, belief and expectations. These forward-looking statements and all other statements that may be made on this call that are not historical facts are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. Please refer to our SEC filings for more information on the factors that could cause actual results to differ. Cogent undertakes no obligation to update or revise our forward-looking statements. If we use non-GAAP financial measures during this call, you will find these reconciled to the GAAP measurements in our earnings release, which is posted on our website at www.cogentco.com. A little update on COVID-19. Like many other companies, Cogent continues to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying responses by governments around the world. Virtually, our entire workforce continues to work remotely. I want to thank the entire Cogent workforce and in particular, our IT department for their hard work during these challenging times. I also want to thank our field engineers, contractors and other employees who continue to work on the front-lines, installing our new customers and maintaining and upgrading our network so that we can continue to serve our customers. The ultimate impact of the pandemic on Cogent is unknown as a significant amount of uncertainty and volatility remains. We do not know the scope and duration of the pandemic, what actions governments may take in the future in response to the pandemic and how the pandemic will impact the economies of the world. While Cogent is working remotely, we have no assurance that this will be sufficient to protect our workforce and our key employees. Moreover, our results of operations may be adversely…

Thanks, Sean. Hopefully, you've had a chance to review our earnings press release. Our press release includes a number of historically accurate metrics and is presented in a consistent basis. Now for a few comments against expectations and targets. Our corporate business, which represents 67% of our revenues this quarter, our corporate business grew year-over-year by 1.3% from the third quarter of 2019 and fell by 1.3% and from the second quarter of 2020. Our NetCentric business, which represents 33% of our revenues, had a strong quarter and grew by 5.9% sequentially on a quarter-over-quarter basis and grew by 9.6% on a year-over-year basis from the third quarter of 2019. An increase in USF tax rate has a positive impact on our corporate revenues sequentially, but a negative impact on a year-over-year basis. The USF tax rate changes quarterly, and we cannot predict the impact of future USF rates on changes in our revenue. Volatility in exchange rates primarily impact our NetCentric business. On a constant currency basis, our NetCentric business increased 6.9% from the third quarter of 2019 and 2.3% sequentially from Q2 of 2020. Our long-term EBITDA annual margin expansion guidance remains at a targeted annual improvement rate of 200 basis points a year. Our multiyear constant currency long-term revenue growth target remains approximately 10%. Our revenue and EBITDA guidance targets are intended to be multiyear goals and not are intended to be used for any specific annual guidance. Now Sean will provide some additional operational detail on our business. And then I'll come back to give a bit of a summary.

Thanks, Dave, and again, good morning to everyone. Let's talk about corporate and NetCentric revenue and customer connections. We analyze our revenues based upon network type, on-net, off-net and noncore, and we also analyze our revenues based upon customer type. We classify all of our customers into 2 types, NetCentric customers and Corporate customers. Our Corporate customers buy bandwidth from us in large multi-tenant office building as well as carrier-neutral data centers. Our NetCentric customers buy significant amounts of bandwidth from us in our -- in carrier-neutral data centers. Revenue and customer connections by customer type. Revenue from our Corporate customers for the quarter fell sequentially by 1.3% to $95.7 million and grew year-over-year by 1.3%. We believe that the slowdown in the growth rate of our Corporate revenues was directly impacted by the continuing concerns raised by COVID-19. While we continue to have significant dialogue with our existing and potential customers, some customers are delaying the upgrade of services or purchases of new services due to the uncertainty regarding COVID-19, mostly in off-net office buildings. In many new sales orders, customers are reducing their aggregate number of locations, and this results in lower sales to satellite offices. The slowdown in sales combined with normal historical levels of churn, has contributed to a modest reduction in Corporate sales for this period. The higher USF rate, which only applies to corporate virtual private network connections increased Corporate revenues, while the continuing trend of lower local loop pricing reduced off-net Corporate revenue as we continue to pass on those savings to new customers. We had 47,722 Corporate customer connections on our network at the quarter end, which was a decline of 1.2% versus the second quarter, and a decrease of 0.9% over the third quarter of 2019. Quarterly revenue from our NetCentric…

Hey, thanks, Sean. I'd like to highlight a couple of strengths of our network, our customer base and our sales force. Cogent's network scale continues to grow due to the expansion of our physical network. We now operate in 47 countries. As we've introduced our services to new markets, the breadth of our network or our sales force and our competitive pricing model has helped us grow demand and new services in these locations. Our initial success in South America and Africa indicates that we can profitably extend our network into new markets and our business model into many more countries. We have, today, over 968 million square feet of multi-tenant office space directly on-net in North America. We operate 54 Cogent control data centers with over 606,000 square feet of raised floor space operating at 32% capacity. Our network consists of over 36,700 metro fiber miles and over 58,100 intercity route miles of fiber. Our focus remains to develop one of the most interconnected, high-capacity Internet backbones in the world, and that strategy continues to bear fruit. We now have directly connected to the Cogent network over 7,220 networks, up from 6,844 connected networks at this time last year. This collection of telephone companies, Internet service providers, cable companies, mobile operators and other carriers provides us access to the vast majority of the world's broadband subscribers and mobile phone users. This large collection of eyeballs or end users positions Cogent as the go-to network for Internet applications and content providers. The work-from-home environment continues to push our corporate on-net customers to upgrade their Internet connections to support greater infrastructure with larger connections for their work-from-home employees. As employees remain outside of the main office, corporations need high-capacity circuits both in and out of these premises. Cogent's robust bidirectional symmetric…

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Phil Cusick with JPMorgan.

Dave, can you just go again through your comments on September and October? You talked about really good sales momentum in September, what did you see in October? And then in terms of traffic growth as well, is that coming from big customers at lower prices? Or are you seeing that more like average price?

Sure. Thanks for the question, Phil. We saw a reacceleration in sales activity, both in our Corporate and NetCentric business as customers return from their summer vacations, as they start to understand what their permanent IT requirements are going to be. We saw many Corporate customers begin to make decisions that maybe had been put on hold earlier in the pandemic, and we saw improvements in our sales efficacy of both the Corporate and NetCentric customers. Our NetCentric business is a volume-driven business. We saw a great deal of breadth in our growth in traffic, not from any one customer or even a handful of large customers, but a continuing broadening of our customer base. Our traffic growth grew sequentially from September and October, 8%. That kind of mirrors the type of traffic growth acceleration we saw in March and April as the pandemic first hit. The key application that drives growth remains streaming. But we've seen the number of streaming providers grow dramatically the number of choices that are being offered, and that has broadened our customer base. Secondly, with over 7,220 access networks buying access from us, we saw a significant improvement there in those access networks customers downloading traffic. And kind of overlying all of these trends is just the acclamation of the sales force to the changes that came about and deploying our new CRM system. With any change comes some disruption, and that was probably more challenging in a remote environment than it would have been if our employees were physically in offices. Our learning teams did a great job in training and helping those individuals understand the benefits of these new systems. And we're continuing to see the productivity improvement with actually record productivity in terms of calls made, e-mails made, opportunities created on a per capita basis. And with that, we expect to see an acceleration in our sales productivity numbers. Just to remind investors, we don't report sales on bookings. We report sales numbers only upon the installation of services. So the lag of a few weeks to a few months for off-net will begin showing up in our fourth quarter sales productivity numbers.

Can you just remind me quickly, what was the timing of when that new CRM system was implemented? And when -- and do you now think that everything is sort of normal?

So it was implemented the first week in July, we did not want to disrupt the end of quarter and end of month sales in June. We migrated off of our previous CRM provider, which was a SaaS service. And the initial deployment actually went relatively smooth, but because the new tools were more completely integrated into Cogent's other tools and systems, it really did take some retraining. And I would say in July and August, which are typically slow sales months anyhow, we had this extra issue. By September, all of the issues related to that deployment have been resolved. And as I said, sales activities measured by these KPIs are at historically high levels now.

Your next question comes from Frank Louthan with Raymond James.

I can't hear you. Could you...

Hey, Dave, it's Frank. I think he turned the...

Hey, Frank. You're loud and clear now.

Great. All right. So a quick question on the buybacks there. Have you made any purchases in Q4? And can you give us the average price in Q3 and your thoughts there? And the move on NetCentric revenue was good sequentially. Anything onetime in there or FX impact that we should know about?

Yes. So let me take those in reverse order. First of all, we did not have any material FX impact in NetCentric, there was some impact, but not material. Second, there was no large order or any kind of onetime benefit. This was a broad participation of our customer base. Both small and large customers, access networks and content providers, and those trends have actually accelerated into the fourth quarter. We reported on October's numbers, we're only a few days into November. But we continue to hit daily traffic volume, growth records. And as the majority of our footprint is returning to some kind of modified lockdown or shelter in place, particularly in Europe, we're seeing significant growth out of many of our access customers in those markets where those pandemic reactions are being deployed. Now I'll pivot to the repurchase program. Our repurchases were relatively modest in the third quarter at an average price of just over $59 a share. We were more aggressive in our purchases in October, and we purchased at slightly over $56 a share. We continue to monitor the shares, and we do have a buyback. We're not going to comment on our current market activity just as our shareholders don't tell us when they're buying and selling. We want to have that same market advantage as we compound value for our shareholders.

And just to clarify, we bought back $3.3 million, not shares, million dollars worth.

Correct.

Great. And one quick housekeeping thing. I assume your annual sales are going to be virtual. Is there -- and I don't know that's usually a hit in the first quarter. Any thoughts on kind of a cost savings you might get from that for delta just for modeling purposes?

Yes. So we have already concluded that for 2020, our sales meeting will be virtual. By adopting a virtual format, we're also going to be launching for the first time a customer sales event as well. So traditionally, our sales meetings have been exclusively internal. This year, because we are migrating to a virtual platform, we're actually going to have customers participate as well as salespeople, even with a much larger participation, we think we'll recognize probably about a $1.3 million, $1.4 million savings in the first quarter versus what we spent last year.

Your next question comes from Colby Synesael with Cowen.

Two, if I may. First off, on sub trends, so whether it's on-net or off-net, we saw a fairly notable deceleration in total net adds in the third quarter versus really historical trend. Based on the productivity comments that you're speaking of that you're seeing already in the fourth quarter, can you give us some color on what we should anticipate for sub trends going forward? And then also the $9.5 million IRU payment also up notably versus what we typically see, I think you referenced maybe $2 million or so last year. How should we think about those going forward as you continue to look to expand the network? You mentioned South America, you mentioned Africa. How should we think about those IRU payments going forward since, obviously, [ at the end of ] data has some type of cash consequence?

Yes. Sure, Colby. A couple of different questions there. Let's take the unit productivity and sub trends. The primary drag on our business has actually been our off-net corporate sales. Our on-net corporate sales are slightly below trend line but pretty much still in line with historic averages. When we sell to a Corporate customer, the sale begins with an on-net sale. Those sales are continuing very well at primary locations. They've actually been bolstered by the fact that existing customers are migrating from 100 megabit to gigabit connections to support VPN work. And our new sales are almost exclusively 1 gigabit, pulling our ARPUs up. It is really the secondary locations that have suffered. Companies saying, we don't have employees in those offices. We're not going to make any network decisions until we understand what our final real estate footprint will look like. As a result of that, we are selling less connections, both for Internet and VPN services, whether SD-WAN or VPLS to those secondary locations. Most of those are off-net. That is why our off-net revenue actually declined on a year-over-year basis. It did grow slightly in the quarter, but much below historic trends. On average, we would typically grow our on-net and off-net Corporate sales at the same rate. We do also sell a few secondary locations off-net. Those have also slowed. That's why that growth rate has slightly decelerated. But in general, our Corporate on-net business is performing well. And actually, in this environment, far better than any other wireline provider. But it's that off-net problem that has really impacted our business. And then pivoting over to our NetCentric customers, which by primarily on a metered basis, we're seeing a real acceleration in larger port sizes as those customers look to optimize cross-connect expenses in…

Can I just add to that, Dave? We spent $6.1 million in the first quarter, $3.7 million in the second, and obviously, went up to $9.5 million. We expect it will come back down into that range of $3 million to $6 million, we'll call it, $4 million to $5 million in the future. So that was as we expanded into those 2 Latin American countries. That was a bit of an anomaly.

Yes. It was onetime.

Your next question comes from Walter Piecyk with LightShed.

Dave, with the deceleration that's going on in the Corporate business, which has traditionally been pretty steady for you. I guess two questions. One, I mean, back in May, you thought that we could get back to historical averages, that's clearly not happening. When do you think that may happen? And if it doesn't happen, your leverage ratio has now gone up and is going up because you obviously increased the rate of dividend payments. So I'm just curious like if Corporate doesn't revert back to like a normalized growth rate, does it make sense to continue to grow the dividend like you are at this pace?

Okay. So let me -- there are 3 questions there, and I'm going to take them in reverse order. We are absolutely committed to being efficient in returning capital and our dividend has been a very effective way to do that. Also, because roughly 50% of our dividend has been able to be characterized as a return of capital, we have aired more on dividends than buybacks. But Cogent has consistently returned more incremental capital each and every quarter to shareholders, and we feel that the 14.1% growth rate in dividend can absolutely be supported by the growth rate in our free cash flow. The second point you raised was the change in our leverage ratios. And as we mentioned in the script, that was almost exclusively as a result of foreign currency translation. We elected not to hedge our EUR 350 million denominated debt. We chose to raise debt in Europe because it was a lower cost of capital, almost 100 basis points, less expensive than in the U.S. And because our European operations are profitable, we can service that debt and repay that debt out of European operations. So the optical increase in our leverage ratio was not as a result of incremental true debt on a constant currency basis, but rather that $17.4 million swing that occurred in the -- a value of that $350 million debt, that's a non-cash and non-realized loss for the quarter. And our bet is, over time, the euro will probably remain about where it is against the dollar. Now to your very first question, which is corporate growth. The corporate growth has really been a tale of on-net and off-net. The on-net corporate growth rate is pretty close to being within long-term trend lines. We've averaged about 11% growth. We're probably around 9%. And considering the work-from-home environment and the impact of the pandemic, that's pretty impressive. It's really been the shortfall in off-net, which is secondary locations. I do believe companies are going through a bit of a real estate reevaluation. They will ultimately decide on what architecture is best for them. But I do not believe that there will be a permanent exodus from U.S. cities, and our footprint will remain the core for our Corporate customers' real estate needs. We absolutely believe that our Corporate business should end up growing back at historic trends. But even if it doesn't, we have sufficient cash flow generation and our margin contribution is actually improving because our NetCentric business has a much higher percentage of on-net versus off-net than our Corporate business. So all in all, we're very comfortable with our ability to grow cash flow and continue to grow the dividend.

So you're saying in the third quarter, your on-net Corporate growth rate was 9%? Because that's -- I don't -- the math would be challenging to get to 1.3%...

No. No. Since the beginning of the pandemic. So if you take...

Oh, okay. But I'm just looking at the quarter, right? So -- and thank you for the clarification on the euro. So right now, your Corporate business is growing at 1.3%. It was 10% only a couple of quarters ago. So I guess the question again is, if you can't return that to growth -- and back in May, you thought you could return it back to that normalized growth and we stay at this 1% type of growth rate annually for Corporate, then notwithstanding any changes in currency, your leverage will rise to like 3.3 or 3.4. And I'm just in that scenario, does it make sense to continue to increase the dividend at this rate?

So the answer is we will continue to increase the dividend. We have a leverage ratio that's between 2.5 and 3.5. So the 3.3 or 3.4 that you referenced is still within that guidance. Secondly, we have consistently messaged to investors that we have a requirement to disgorge excess cash on our balance sheet. The only method to do that is either through accelerated buybacks or accelerated dividends. And as you saw in this last quarter, we took the opportunity to avail ourselves of both techniques.

So only if the leverage gets above 3.5 should we start to wonder whether maybe the dividend growth should not remain the way you have it set?

I think that's right, Walt. And again, 3.5 is not set in stone. We have historically evaluated our leverage targets each and every quarter with the Board. Just to remind you, our initial leverage target was 2.5x when we first raised debt. And then when we breach that, the Board established the new guidance range of 2.5x to 3.5x. When we compare ourselves to other businesses with the durability of our revenue stream and the predictability of growth. Even in a very turbulent macro environment, we have substantially more borrowing capacity. And in a low interest rate environment, it may actually be beneficial to shareholders to continue to evaluate whether 3.5x is the right target. So I don't have an answer today because we're sitting here below the target range.

Your next question comes from Michael Rollins with Citi.

I was curious if you could update us on where your market shares are for the corporate and NetCentric business, how you look at the baseline opportunities to increase that over time? And then as you look at pricing in the corporate market, how do you view the durability of your price points for the different speed tiers that you're selling into the base?

Yes. Sure, Mike. So with just under 1,800 multi-tenant office buildings on-net and 968 million square feet, we have 22.5 connections sold per building. That's down slightly from the 22.9% last quarter. We did add some new buildings late in the quarter with no customers. We do have typically sold about 1.5 connections per customer. Today, it's more likely we're selling closer to one connection because we're not selling very much in the way of VPN services. I think that will change. The connections that are sold tend to be of higher speed. So we're selling gigabit at higher ARPUs and our ARPUs are going up. Also, our product is non-oversubscribed, non-blocked and symmetric. That has real implications for work-at-home employees as those ad hoc VPNs concentrated at a firewall need to have that level of symmetry and many of our competitors don't have products that can offer that type of service. Cable and telco have typically sold products that are symmetric in their services may have usage caps. So for our Corporate customers, our 3 times greater reliability, 9 times faster install and better price performance and volume throughputs all give us, I think, a great deal of superiority. We also sell to our corporate customers on a limited basis, some off-net services and on-net buildings. You said, why would you do that? And it's customers wanting a backup service on a diverse network. And that's actually become more critical since the pandemic. No company wants its VPN concentration to be down. They realize that in that backup mode, they're going to be in a lower bandwidth operation, but they are absolutely very interested in getting that network redundancy. So we are picking up some additional connections, not for VPN, but for redundant off-net connections to on-net customers. And then on the NetCentric side, the service is primarily metered, so you pay by the megabit. The port size does have a reservation fee associated with it, but the majority of the revenue is based on traffic flows and large reports mean fewer cross-connects and data centers and we're continuing to see a significant migration from 10 gigabit to 100 gigabit ports. We feel that we have more idle capacity in more data centers than any other provider in the world, and that's allowed us to gain market share. So in both our Corporate and NetCentric markets, we feel pretty good about our market share gains.

Your next question comes from Nick Del Deo with MoffettNathanson.

First, Dave, you've expressed confidence that Class A office space would ultimately be okay as we got through the pandemic. I think you made a quick comment to that effect earlier in the Q&A. Has your thinking on that front evolved at all or become more nuanced, whether from a timing perspective or in more fundamental factors?

So I have to admit my thinking on the pandemic has evolved quite a bit over the 8 months that we've been living with this. First of all, I think the duration is going to be much longer. Yes, this is both me as an individual and my observations and talking to salespeople and customers. I don't think we're going to return to anything resembling normality for at least another year. If you would ask me that question back in April or May, I would have not expected an 18-month pandemic disruption to life. Secondly, I believe that central business districts will continue to house businesses. And the skyscrapers in which we operate will continue to have substantially higher occupancy rates than they previously did. As a result of lower rents, tenants will tend to migrate from more marginal buildings into better buildings. The majority of our footprint about 59% are lead certified. The buildings are, on average, nearly 50 times the national average. I think many of the equity owners of those buildings may get wiped out, but the buildings won't disappear. I also think the work habits are going to change. We're going to go to a hybrid model where some employees, some days at a week will work remotely. Secondly, I think the shared office model, probably will not return anywhere like it was a year ago with the growth of companies like Regus and WeWork. Third, I think the offices will typically be doored offices, requiring more square foot per capita and less open floor plans. So I think the aggregate usage per employee will actually go up. You won't have as many employees in the office as many days of the week, but the offices will still remain in business. Like I was sharing with…

Can I just add some to Dave's color, Nick? If we look at our multi-tenant office buildings, these 1,800 buildings we talk about and we look at direct Internet access connections, if the world of direct -- of central business offices was declining, we would see an acceleration in churn in those buildings for those type of circuits. And indeed, the churn has actually gone down in a couple of months. So yes, as we mentioned, corporates are delaying decisions and not deciding to do things now. We're seeing normal levels of churn, but we don't see a material change in the number of tenants in those buildings. We do see discussions from commercial brokers where law firms who might be in 3 floors might go to 2 floors. I think we'll benefit from that. Equals more space and potentially be more tenants. We won't really see any change in that until the pandemic is over and people sort of return to normalcy.

Got it. I don't want to drag the call out too much. But Dave, I thought the comment you made regarding off-net locations in different metro areas versus within a metro area was interesting. Is there a way to size what share of your off-net corporate connections would be in -- fall into one category versus the other?

So we obviously have data on where those nearly 12,000 connections are -- 11,900. They're in approximately 6,800 buildings. I would say the majority, greater than 50%, are in different MSAs or markets. But there is a significant minority that operate within a given MSA as well. So we do have exposure there. I'd be lying if we didn't, and that's really where the pain has been.

Your next question comes from Tim Horan with Oppenheimer.

Just following the previous questions thread, Dave. So I guess the million-dollar question is, will we see churn pick up in these Class A office spaces next year because of COVID or people just deciding, look, I don't want to be in these downtown areas anymore. I want out of here. Or if that will happen or not? Yes, obviously, if that doesn't happen, it's very good for your business. But I hear you on a bit, but you know it's going to be another 12, 18 months, maybe some people just give up on those leases and move out is the question, I guess.

Yes. And I wish I had the answer to that question. I'm also going to answer the question with my experience as a central business district landlord. I actually am continuing to sign new leases in downtown space. I signed about a new lease a week in my portfolio. I mean, that's anecdotal evidence. I do think companies are rethinking how their workforce is going to be housed. And I do think there will be some permanent work from home, but I think it will be more on a flex basis. I just -- and talking to customers have not been able to see how a large law firm can function without, say, an office. If, in fact, a law firm shrinks its footprint, that could actually be a net positive for us because it increases the number of discrete tenants in a building. Our average customer today is housed in about 8,000 square feet and has 30 desktops. Now clearly, we have some very large law firms that have 10 floors in a building and 3,000 or 4,000 desktops. If they end up going to half of that footprint, that's probably a net positive for us. I just don't see people totally abandoning cities. There will be a shift, but a lot of individuals voluntarily chose an urban lifestyle and much business still depends on physical contact and interaction. We're making do in a pandemic. We're getting by with social distancing and Zoom conferences. But I know in talking to customers, one of the common refrains I had here is, I'm Zoom exhausted. I can't wait to get back to my office. So again, this is all anecdotal feedback, but I think rents will come down. There will be increased competition. There will be turnover in the ownership of these assets, but I just don't see, say, the New York or San Francisco or Chicago skylines going dark.

Can I just add one thing to Dave's insight is we did have a conversation -- Jones Lang LaSalle has a research group. They went and they surveyed 100 commercial tenants in the Midwest. These are businesses that are in place like Chicago and Pittsburgh and Minneapolis. Of these 100, 95 said they're not leaving that central business district. 5% said they don't know. They're not sure. Zero said they're leaving. I think it's very, very difficult. We service 95 of the 100 largest law firms in the United States. It's very difficult for a law firm to be successful if they aren't near their clients. They can attract very, very smart, intelligent people to come work there. And tracking them out, they can't do it in suburbs or anywhere else. They have to do in central business districts, where there are other vendors and their clients are. So we remain, again, our small to medium-sized business clients of knowledge workers who are in consulting firms, accounting firms, law firms. These are the folks who have to be in central business districts. And we -- again, we haven't seen any uptick, no uptick whatsoever in our multi-tenant office buildings of these direct Internet access ports, which are the lifeblood of that Internet infrastructure for those types of companies.

And I'll close on one comment. I was talking to a partner and one of our customers. And he said, one of the greatest challenges is, how do they train and attract new talent in a remote environment? We figured it out in Cogent for a telesales organization. That's a much different training curve than a partner track at a white shoe law firm or a partner track at a McKinsey or a Bain or a BCG. I mean those young, very smart individuals need the mentoring in person of senior partners, and that's not going away. So we will get through this. My thinking has evolved. It is taking longer, but we will return to something that resembles the life we lived before the pandemic. It happened in 1918, and it's going to happen again.

I'm showing no further question at this time. I would now like to turn the conference back to Mr. Dave Schaeffer.

I want to thank everyone. Please stay safe, social distance, wash your hands, wear a mask. Those aren't political statements. Those are good hygiene. And feel free to reach out to Sean or myself, if anyone has any questions. I would normally say I look forward to seeing you on the conference circuit, but now I look forward to talking to you on the conference circuit. Take care, everyone.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation, and have a wonderful day. You may all disconnect.