Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Shenandoah Telecommunications' Third Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded.At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. John Nesbett of IMS and investor Relations for Shentel.

Good morning and thank you for joining us. The purpose of today's call is to review Shentel's results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2019. Our results were announced in a press release distributed this morning, and the presentation we'll be reviewing is included on our investor page at our website, www.shentel.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; Dave Heimbach, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer; and Jim Volk, Senior Vice President Finance and CFO. After our prepared remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. As always, let me refer you to Slide 2 of the presentation, which contains our Safe Harbor disclaimer and reminds you that this conference may include forward-looking statements subject to certain risks and uncertainties.These may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements; hence, I'll provide a detailed discussion of various risk factors in our SEC filings, which you're 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.Okay, with that, I'll turn the call over to Chris now. Go ahead, Chris.

Thanks, John. We appreciate everyone joining us this morning. In the third quarter, we continued to generate strong free cash flow across our business segments, enabling us to both invest in growth and return value to our shareholders.As you see on Slide 4, Shentel generated $86.4 million of free cash flow for the 9 months ending September 30, 2019. During the same time period, we have invested approximately $17 million for 2.5 gigahertz license spectrum to be used for our new fixed wireless broadband offering, $10 million for the acquisition of Big Sandy Broadband and $9 million into our new Fiber-to-the-Home business initiative.In addition to these growth investments, we repaid $45 million of our term loan, moving us down to the lowest interest rate tier on our debt facility and lowering annual interest expense by $1.8 million. Highlighting our commitment to shareholder returns, earlier this week, our Board of directors approved a cash dividend of $0.29 per share. This reflects a 7.4% increase over the prior year and marks the 7th consecutive year of an annual increase. It is also Shentel's 59th consecutive year of dividend payments. In addition to the cash dividend, our board authorized $80 million for our first share repurchase program. We expect this program to execute over the next 12 months as market conditions warrant.During the third quarter, we've continued to execute on our growth strategies. We had record wireless postpaid net additions of approximately 11,700 in the quarter. This week, we launched in Harrisonburg, Virginia our Fiber-to-the-Home business that we have branded Glo Fiber. Both of these milestones are leading indicators of the long-term growth we expect in the coming years.Dave will speak in more detail about our operating results later in the call. Despite these recent achievements, the continuing dispute over the travel fee…

Thank you, Chris, and good morning, everyone. Now turning to the financials, please refer to Slide 6. Consolidated revenue was $155.2 million for the third quarter 2019, compared to $158.7 million in the third quarter of 2018. Consolidated adjusted OIBDA for the quarter was $62.8 million, compared to $69.5 million in the same period of last year.Operating income decreased $2.9 million to $25.4 million versus $28.3 million in the third quarter of 2018. Net income for the quarter was $14.4 million or $0.29 per diluted share, compared to $15.5 million or $0.31 per diluted share in the prior-year period. As Chris referenced earlier, the declines in consolidated results were adversely driven by the continued dispute of the travel fee with Sprint in the wireless segment.In our wireless highlights on Slide 7, wireless operating revenues for the third quarter 2019 decreased $5.7 million to $110.4 million as compared to $116.1 million in the prior-year period. The decline in revenue was due to a $4.5 million decrease in Sprint travel revenue and a $1.1 million decline in subscriber revenue. We did not recognize any travel revenue in the third quarter due to the travel fee dispute.Subscriber revenue declines were due to a combination of lower postpaid ARPU of $1.67, due primarily to promotional from discounts, higher contract asset amortization expense from higher gross adds over the past year, higher bad debt write-offs, partially offset by an increase of approximately 38,000 postpaid subscribers.When we adopted the new revenue recognition pronouncement, ASC 606, certain expenses, including bad debt and contract costs like commissions are reported as contra revenue.Adjusted OIBDA for the Wireless segment decreased $6.8 million to $50.9 million in the third-quarter 2019, compared to $57.7 million in the prior year period. In addition to the revenue declines of $5.7 million, tower rents expense…

Thanks, Jim, and good morning, everyone. I'll start by going over some of our operational highlights from the third quarter of 2019. On Slide 12, we show the key metrics of our postpaid wireless business. We had approximately 823,000 postpaid subscribers at the end of the third quarter.Net ads for the third quarter 2019 were approximately 12,000 for postpaid, compared to 5,000 in the third quarter of 2018. The incremental net gain year-over-year was driven both by record phone additions and record IoT device additions on the strength of terrific execution of our local marketing programs and at point-of-sale in the field across both owned retail and third-party distribution.Postpaid churn rose 15 basis points year over year to 1.99%, with approximately one-third of the increase due to line-level churn in response to promo roll-offs. And one-third of the increase was due to account level port outs to Verizon as a result of their new unlimited plan pricing and some XFINITY Mobile ads, and the remainder of the increase was a combination of IoT churn and some one-time events.In contrast, gross additions increased 26% year over year by over 12,000 with phones representing 77% of total postpaid activations and up 16% versus the prior-year period. As Jim already mentioned, postpaid ARPU declined approximately $1.67 year-over-year, driven primarily by Sprint promotional discounting and to a lesser extent, the increase in the mix of IoT devices in the base.This quarter marks the 8th consecutive quarter we've enjoyed a positive port in to port out ratio with a 1.2 to 1 ratio for the third quarter of 2019. We also continue to increase our retail presence and finished the quarter with 169 Sprint postpaid branded doors, an increase of almost 7% year-over-year.Lastly, 7.2% of our postpaid base upgraded their device in the quarter and…

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Zack Silver with B. Riley FBR. Your line is now open.

Okay, great. Thanks for taking the question. The first one is just on the postpaid ARPU versus some of the -- the postpaid to ARPU dipped in the quarter, but you also mentioned that some of the churn was due to some line-level churn from promotional deals expiring. So I'm just trying to reconcile why there would have been such a big dip if you did have some of those promotional lines coming off?

Sure, Zack. This is Dave. I think the biggest driver that we're seeing in postpaid ARPU declines really relates to the migration or shift that's under way in the base with respect to folks that were on legacy unlimited rate plans that are churning. And those subscribers that are coming on to new unlimited rate plans, but enjoying some pretty heavy promotional discounting attributed to those new unlimited rate plans as they come on.And the mix shift is really the principal driver of the ARPU decline. And that's primarily as a result of handset financing promos that Sprint is offering to incentivize new subscriber additions. So that mix shift is really the -- it's probably three quarters of the decline. And I would say that the IoT mix shift is probably the balance.

Got it, thank you. And then just to follow-up. Just on the -- I mean on the travel side, I know that you can't say much, but I mean is it -- and I think I asked this last quarter, but is there anything to read into your relationship with Sprint with this or is this just something where maybe they're distracted with the T-Mobile merger and can't get around to it? I guess anything that we should read into about your relationship with Sprint in this travel dispute?

No, Zack. There's nothing to read into it. We've had, through the years, a number of different things that we've had disputes on. This one was one that through -- while we were having constructive negotiations, as we reported to you, even most recently at your conference in New York, we just felt like we had reached a point where we needed to take it to the next step as provided in our agreement.

That makes sense. And then one more if I could. Just on -- you mentioned that Verizon is getting -- has gotten a bit more promotional. Anything on the other carriers, AT&T with the FirstNet rollout, or Kemo, I guess, they rebranded some of their plans. And also, I mean have talked about deepening their deployment of 600 megahertz?

Right. No, the big one that stands out for us in the quarter is Verizon. That's the big shift we saw, particularly toward the end of the quarter, just in terms of increased churn versus the trends we've been seeing. And again, it was primarily related to the discounting of their unlimited rate plan and to a lesser extent, and this one's a tough one for us to understand in super concrete terms, we think some of the activity related to Comcast entering into the market.

Got it. Thanks, Dave.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Hamed Khorsand with BWS Financial. Your line is now open.

Hi, good morning. So just to follow-up on those -- that comment right there was are you able to match that discounting and how much would that hurt in your forward ARPU?

Yes, Hamed, this is Dave. We -- as I think you know, we operate off of the Sprint national rate card, and we think that we have a really compelling value proposition in our markets, given the strength of our network, the strength of our service and distribution and believe that we certainly represent a far superior price value equation to Verizon, certainly, in our footprint. But as a -- and look, let me spell it out for you, it's less than 5 basis points of total churn we're talking about as the increase here out of 199 basis points. So it's nothing, no sky is falling thing. It's just a way to explain some of the variance we saw in the quarter.

Okay, got you. And then as far as the trends you're seeing on the postpaid side, I mean you're continually seeing over 10,000 net ads in the postpaid wireless. And is there something different that you're doing? Or is this purely just a matter of having a large network and finally being able to penetrate it.

Yes, it's that. It's a rinse wash repeat strategy that we have been employing for years now of adding territory, upgrading the networks and coverage in those territories, and then following that rapidly with expanding distribution. So when you see us talk about opening new doors, those new doors are having a tremendous impact on our results in terms of driving new growth. And so we're incredibly pleased with our team's performance in that regard.

And if this Sprint arbitration is expected to take several months, are you going to do anything different as far as OpEx is concerned?

No, we're not planning any material changes to the business in lieu of the Sprint travel dispute.

Okay, thank you.

And at this time, I'm showing no further questions. I'd like to turn the call back over to Mr. Volk for any closing remarks?

Yes. Thank you, everyone, for joining our call today and we look forward to keeping you updated on our progress in future quarters. Thanks, and have a good day.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.