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Uniti Group Inc. (UNIT)

Q3 2025 Earnings Call· Tue, Nov 4, 2025

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to today's conference call to discuss Uniti's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Results. 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.uniti.com, beginning today and will remain available for 365 days. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to introduce Bill DiTullio, Uniti's Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury. Please begin.

Bill DiTullio

Analyst

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining today's conference call to discuss Uniti's third quarter 2025 results. Speaking on the call today will be Kenny Gunderman, our CEO; and Paul Bullington, Uniti's CFO. John Harrobin, 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 Uniti's fiber build strategy, the business' growth potential, our 2025 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 Kenny.

Kenneth Gunderman

Analyst

Thanks, Bill. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining. Starting on Slide 3, we're very pleased to have closed our merger with Windstream during the third quarter, and we're now well positioned as the premier insurgent fiber provider. We have a scaled national wholesale fiber footprint that puts us in rare company to win large-scale Fiber Infrastructure deals, and we are first or early with fiber to hundreds of Tier 2 and 3 markets around the country, giving us the right to win for many years into the future. Our strategy is very clear and is the same simple winning formula we've had at Uniti for years. First, continue to build fiber into unique locations, including by overbuilding legacy networks and moving customers onto our owned fiber while aggressively managing out of legacy products and services; second, providing operational excellence; and third, having an insurgent obsessive focus on the customer. This formula has led to industry-leading churn and NPS scores and predictable mid-single-digit growth at Uniti. Fiber is indisputably a superior product and coupled with execution prowess, we're now firmly on the same path post our merger with Windstream. Even though we've not yet had full quarter of performance to report, we're starting to see strong improving trends. We continue to add industry veterans to our leadership team, including with experience at Frontier and Ziply, among others, and we've now fully onboarded and are ramping up key third-party partners to accelerate our fiber build and go-to-market strategy. We now have 115 active third-party crews, which is about 2.5x increase from before the merger, and we should have close to 400 by the second quarter of next year. Thus, even though we were behind our plan at the merger close, we fully expect to get caught up and beyond in…

Paul Bullington

Analyst

Thank you, Kenny. Starting on Slide 11. I'd like to touch on some of the key third quarter highlights for both Kinetic and our Fiber Infrastructure segment. As a reminder, our fiber-to-the-home platform will continue to be branded as Kinetic. Fiber Infrastructure will include our previous Uniti Fiber and Uniti Leasing segments, along with the Windstream Wholesale segment, and we are now also referring to the Windstream Managed Solutions segment as Uniti Solutions. During the quarter, we continued to make solid progress on several fronts. Starting with Kinetic, we expanded our fiber network to pass an additional 56,000 homes with fiber, ending the quarter with 1.8 million homes passed. Kinetic also added 24,000 net new fiber subscribers during the third quarter, ending the quarter with 507,000 total fiber subscribers. As Kenny mentioned earlier, this was the second highest level of net adds in the past 2 years, and total Kinetic fiber subscribers grew 17% from the prior year period. Kinetic Consumer fiber revenue grew 26% year-over-year during the quarter, and this growth is being driven by strong adoption of our fiber-to-the-home product, bolstered by the performance of the various marketing initiatives at Kinetic that target both our newer and more seasoned cohorts. At Fiber Infrastructure, Uniti and Windstream combined to record consolidated pro forma bookings MRR of approximately $1.6 million, the second highest level in over 2 years. Slide 12 highlights the sustained momentum we are seeing within Kinetic Fiber. Fiber penetration of almost 29% during the quarter was up 50 basis points sequentially, the second-best sequential improvement over the past 3 years and 130 basis points year-over-year. while fiber ARPU increased 10% year-over-year. The slight sequential decrease in ARPU during the quarter was primarily driven by onetime price adjustments and the acceleration of new fiber subscriber net adds. Turning…

Kenneth Gunderman

Analyst

Thanks, Paul. I'd like to close with a couple of comments on integration and some incremental growth areas we're focused on. First, integration is going very smoothly, and we've had virtually no system nor customer disruptions. We're also well on our path to full integration and synergy achievement within 36 months, which is in line with our original expectations. We're also excited about a number of budding growth areas, including cross-selling Uniti Solutions products into our enterprise base at both Uniti Fiber and Kinetic. Today, we estimate our managed services attachment rate to be below 3% at Uniti Fiber, for example, and we think it could rise to be materially higher over time. Also, as discussed numerous times before, with the complementary combination of the Uniti and Heritage Windstream wholesale products and networks, we're increasingly confident we can be a bigger share taker in the growing waves market. Today, we estimate our market share to be less than 5%. And with our scaled national network and unique routes, we believe our growth potential could be material. Lastly, at Kinetic, we believe there's a sizable and untapped opportunity with multiple dwelling units within our footprint, and there are seemingly attractive edge-out builds off the Kinetic Fiber footprint and the existing Uniti Fiber dense fiber network. We'll have much more to say about these growth areas in the coming quarters. All said, there's never been a better time to be a fiber provider, and our strategy at Uniti is right for the moment. With that, we'd be happy to take your questions.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Greg Williams with TD Cowen.

Gregory Williams

Analyst

Kenny, just the first question, you noticed in the slide that the total addressable market for fiber is booming, if you will. We're seeing the same thing hearing hyperscalers are even prolonging training phase as they do AGI training now and some of these data centers could be hybrid inference and training data centers. I'm just curious with this 3 years of strong visibility that you're seeing, if the deal mechanics are now changing or when will they change? When will they go from more upfront NRC revenues to more of a lit services and lower CapEx, high-margin structure? Second question is on ABS deals. Paul, you mentioned that you're creating a separate vehicle for Kinetic ABS. I think in the past, you said there's over $3 billion of ABS capacity within the Kinetic assets. Just curious what you would be doing with that ABS. Do you have -- is the business fully funded for the fiber-to-the-home build at this point? And then at this case, the ABS deals would be for refining the debt stack and other projects?

Kenneth Gunderman

Analyst

Greg, all great questions. Yes, on the hyperscaler incremental TAM, look, when we estimated it back at the beginning of this year, we used all the data we had available. We used internal estimates. We used consultant reports that we saw. We used some internal consultants that we were working with, and we came up with those numbers and thought that they were fairly conservative at the time. And when you fast forward to today, I think the real takeaway from the page is not necessarily the aggregate numbers. It's really just the increase in bullishness that we see for ourselves, and that 30% to 50% is a good indicator of that because when we look at those aggregate numbers and compare them to the same kind of data points we started with back at the beginning of the year, they look even more conservative. So, for the industry, both from a digital infrastructure perspective and from a fiber perspective, they just look increasingly conservative every day based on what our customers are saying to both of us privately and publicly. The same comments over and over that demand is outpacing supply. They can't keep up with the demand. And that's really important. And we've talked about this before, Greg, that we've sold mega strand counts, 432 strand counts, and we've had the same customer come back and ask for another 432-strand count. That's just a very bullish data point on demand outpacing supply. They talk about how the AI infrastructure is mission-critical to their businesses. And so, we're very excited about what they're saying and what they're doing. And we're really well-positioned for it at Uniti. We're one of the few scaled national fiber providers out there. Many of these builds are in Tier 2 and 3 markets where…

Paul Bullington

Analyst

Yes. Greg, this is Paul. I'll take your question on ABS. So, we aren't providing specific guidance at this point with regard to 2026 and capital and any financing required in 2026 to fund the Kinetic build plan in particular. However, we do expect to be in a period of investment at Kinetic and Uniti generally, particularly as it relates to the fiber build plan at Kinetic over the next, call it, 4 years. So, we will raise additional capital. And during this period of investment, we do expect our leverage to remain above our long-term target of 4 to 4.5x. But as Kenny has talked about, this is the right strategic move for the business. And it's very similar to the strategy we have deployed in the Fiber Infrastructure business sort of years ago. Building fiber, we think, gives us the right to win. And at Kinetic, once we have that superior product ubiquitous across that network or nearly ubiquitous across that network, it gives us the line of sight to that growth and to free cash flow over a period of time and to eventual deleveraging as well. So, it's definitely the right move for the business to make that investment. And we're excited about ABS. We think ABS will definitely have a role to play with regard to financing the build plan at Kinetic given the relative cost advantages of ABS debt. And like you alluded to, there's significant ABS capacity at Kinetic in particular, the $3 billion to $4 billion capacity number is what we've talked about historically, and we still believe that that is true. With that said, we're very focused on keeping the right amount and mix of assets in the leveraged finance credit box at Uniti. And we understand the long-term importance of access to the high-yield market for Uniti in addition to ABS. So, ABS, we think, is enhancing a part of the solution, but certainly not the full solution for Uniti's capital structure going forward. And when we talk about the 4x secured and 6.5x unsecured ratios as governors for our capital structure, that is something -- that's on our non-ABS assets, I guess, is the best way to put it. That's on our non-ABS assets and EBITDA, and we think that's sometimes missed by the market.

Operator

Operator

And the next question will come from Frank Louthan with Raymond James.

Frank Louthan

Analyst

What do you need to do to take more share in the wavelength market? And who do you see your main competitors there? And then you've made some key hires at Kinetic. Any more positions to fill there? Do you think the teams rounded out for what you need to do?

Kenneth Gunderman

Analyst

Frank, I'll start, and then I'm going to ask John Harrobin to help follow on the second question. And welcome to John. This is his first Uniti earnings call and first of many more to come, hopefully. So yes, Frank, on the wave market, as you know, at Uniti, prior to the merger, we were just starting to get into that market in a bigger way. The vast majority of our product set on the wholesale side was focused on dark fiber, and we love that product, lower capital intensity, higher margin, lower touch, just higher and substantially lower churn. But we're starting to get into the wave market because we definitely began to recognize that there are unique routes on our network, and we felt like lighting those unique routes could give us a -- just similar to how we target Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets, targeting those less trafficked routes could be an opportunity for us to take share, especially as more and more new fiber is being built around the country. So that was kind of the beginnings of the thesis. And now with the merger, we've not only brought in more network to sell, we've brought in people on the team who have a lot of experience selling waves. We've got engineering talent. We've got product talent, marketing talent that is a terrific complement to what we previously had at Uniti in addition to the fact that now we've got a lot more owned network to sell. And in the past, I think the waves market has been really characterized by pricing competition, especially on the Tier 1 routes where you've got 3 or 4 different providers. And we don't tend to like to compete in areas on price. We'd rather compete on infrastructure and…

John Harrobin

Analyst

Yes. Thanks, Frank. Good to be here. And the Kinetic team as it exists today is highly talented. Their results and their resiliency going through a number of changes and the results that they produced during those changes is really a testament to their capability. When it comes to team structure, we first look at what's our strategy and what's our operating plan. And that's what we've really been finalizing over the last few months. We finalized our build strategy. Now it's our operating plan strategy. We'll end November with that kind of tucked in, in a way in a good spot. And then it goes into structure. And we've realized early that we needed a couple of key roles in the business. We've hired a growth leader, David Oliveira, who I've worked with at a couple of other companies, and he is a spectacular leader with a long runway and career ahead of him. Twenty years from now, when we're watching the industry from afar, he'll be running it. And I'm proud to say that he's part of the team and making a large impact already. We have an active search right now for a construction lead. We've got some good people in that part of the business doing double duty as a few folks have exited that department, and we expect to fill that soon with highly capable leaders as well. And then as we look at other opportunities in our operating plan, there's probably going to be a few additions we need to make and refinements around capabilities that we're not so strong at today or even new areas that Kenny mentioned before that are untapped in the Kinetic business. So, when you think about the trajectory, we've got what we need now, and the target is 6 months after the close. So, we closed on August 1, 6 months after the close by February 1. We have the go-forward in-person, highly capable team in place.

Operator

Operator

And the next question will come from Michael Rollins with Citi.

Michael Rollins

Analyst

First, I wanted to ask about Slide 15 a little bit more. So, thanks for sharing this pro forma outlook, both for revenue and EBITDA. I’m curious if you could just share with us how to think about these trends going into 2026 in terms of the type of growth for Fiber Infrastructure. You talked about the tailwinds in Kinetic that you're seeing for this year and just trying to understand maybe some of those headwinds. And then finally, on the EBITDA side of that chart, as revenue moves for each of these big buckets, these segment buckets, how do you think about the operating leverage or the incremental margins that you can extract as the revenues evolve in each of those pieces? And then just secondly, just curious if you have an update on the strategic front. Last quarter in the slides, I think you referenced starting a review for the acquired assets. And just curious if you have any updates on how you're thinking about optimizing your portfolio of assets.

Kenneth Gunderman

Analyst

Michael, I think I wrote down all the questions. We'll try to hit most of them, and I'll start, and Paul, you can jump in on some of the trends, and then I'll come back on [indiscernible] the question. And really, Michael, on the trends, we don't want to get too much into forward guidance at this point other than what we've laid out in some of the key inflection points for next year and how that sets us up for going into 2027. And so, I'll -- but we'll have obviously more to come on guidance when we come back together in February of next year. But on the businesses, I'll start with Fiber Infrastructure. I mean that's a business that we know well that we love and bringing the Windstream Wholesale business into that fold along with heritage Uniti, Fiber and Uniti Wholesale is a terrific synergistic fit. And we think the historical mid-single-digit growth there, we're going to get back to that. And I think there's great both cost savings in that business when we combine them, but also revenue synergies. The waves opportunity, for example, is one of them. Clearly, the hyperscaler opportunity is another that I think is additive and incremental to what we had before because we've now got multiple products to sell to a broader customer set. So very excited about the opportunity in that business. And I think ultimately, when you think about the legacy services within that business, there is some TDM there, right? We're inheriting some TDM in the Windstream Wholesale -- heritage Windstream Wholesale business. But by 2027, 2028, that will be less than $100 million of TDM revenue. So, we're working through that. That will be a little bit of a headwind in that business, but we're working…

Paul Bullington

Analyst

No, I think that's good.

Operator

Operator

And the next question comes from Richard Choe with JPMorgan.

Richard Choe

Analyst · JPMorgan.

I wanted to follow up on the hyperscale opportunity. It seems like that pipeline is just going to continue to grow. But can we get a sense on timing maybe on when you should start signing these deals and coming through and how that should pace over the next few years because it seems like such a big opportunity.

Kenneth Gunderman

Analyst · JPMorgan.

So we've already -- we've signed a lot in the past couple of years. And I'd say the past couple of years, more like the past year, maybe 18 months. And look, this TAM came out of nowhere in a very short period of time. I remember 2 years ago, maybe 30 months ago, we were getting questions about whether or not this was real. Is there really an opportunity there? And we were struggling to answer that question because the numbers and the outlook looked extremely exciting and bullish, but we were trying to be measured in our response. And now we fast forward 2 years, and we can't keep up with the numbers and we can't put numbers on the page that are -- that seem current or that aren't overly conservative. So, we've definitely been signing deals, and we have more to come. I do think, as I said in my prepared remarks, the next couple, several quarters, you're probably going to see the bigger deals are the biggest deals that we've had to date, and those are probably going to start showing up in revenue and EBITDA. And I think that's -- we've said for the past 12 months that many of these deals don't show up in the vanity metrics like bookings or revenue and EBITDA because the nature of the deals are -- if you're building something with a very high NRC, it just doesn't show up in a bookings number. It doesn't show up in a revenue or EBITDA number. And so, we've consistently heard from investors that they want more visibility into those deals and how the economics work, and we have a plan to start showing that in the coming quarters as these bigger deals start to come online. So, all that to say, Richard, we have been signing the deals. They haven't been showing up in the vanity metrics. But on a go-forward basis, I think we're going to be signing more deals, probably bigger deals, and we're going to be able to show you a little bit more visibility into all that.

Richard Choe

Analyst · JPMorgan.

And then one on the Kinetic side. In terms of the churn for the fiber there, the residential customers, where are you losing customers to? And what's the plan to maybe reduce that churn, if you can?

John Harrobin

Analyst · JPMorgan.

Yes. So, this is John. Thanks, Richard. On the fiber churn side, we're high on the churn rate versus benchmark. And that's not dissimilar than Frontier in 2021 when it first started its transformation. And we're losing to the logical players in our fiber footprint, it's not FWA or LEO, its cable, right? It's largely cable. And our approach is to apply the same 5 tactics that I know work, and we're starting to execute those right now. The first tactic really is to clear the decks of any noise, right? And we're making 2 hygiene changes to do that. First, in July, we saw that we were dragging on nonpaid customers for a little bit and incurring bad debt. So now we have a policy to write them off earlier. So that's going to inflate churn a little bit on the fiber side. We'll wash through that by the end of the year. And the second is to really get out of the ACP credit business when the ACP program went away, we extended credits to those customers. And on September 1, we notified them that that's no longer going to be the case and effective September 1, we are no longer subsidizing the ACP program after it went away. That's going to put about a 16-basis point pressure on fiber churn in the fourth quarter. But again, that's just clearing the decks for the future. The second is being more surgical about price ups. Over the last 18 months, the legacy company was pretty aggressive about across the board price ups. So, versus across-the-board price ups, we're going to be more surgical and very customized by each customer based on their competitive profile and their speed tier, assign them a price up that's fair and inflationary. And in…

Richard Choe

Analyst · JPMorgan.

It sounds like a good playbook and nice to clear the decks for next year.

Operator

Operator

And the next question comes from David Barden with New Street Research.

David Barden

Analyst · New Street Research.

I guess I got a couple of questions for John. John, there's a philosophical divide in the fiber market right now, which is building in-house versus outsourced building and how that contributes to your cost to pass and your efficiency and your ability to scale. I was wondering if you could kind of elaborate a little bit on kind of where you are landing on that in the kind of the new kinetic. And then the second is the chart where you guys show the penetration rates for fiber, I mean, 25% to 30% penetration year 1 is pretty incredible. But then it tails off really quickly, only getting us a few more percentage points over the next couple of years. Could you kind of talk a little bit about that arc? How do you get that really high penetration year 1? And then how are we going to scale that further in years 2, 3 plus?

John Harrobin

Analyst · New Street Research.

Yes. Excellent. Thanks, David. And on your first question, we've made 3 major fundamental changes to our build plan over the last several months. First is from having no plan to actually having one with a very specific sequencing of where we're going to build in what order, we know every household specifically for the next 3 years in sequence. The second is moving from subsidized builds largely to strategic builds. And 2025 will be the last year that Kinetic builds more subsidized households than strategic households. And the third is going from predominantly internal construction teams to predominantly external. We took a page out of the Frontier playbook here, put multiyear volume on the table and secured agreements that can scale cost efficiently. And because we have an internal team, we know that we could hire up there, we could deploy. It just takes time and effort. But that gives us a little bit of leverage when negotiating with third parties as well. And it's not one or the other. It's absolutely both. Our internal teams not only have a cost advantage and combine that with our 95% either fiber now or fiber-to-the node allows us for quick and cost-effective deployment of fiber. But the internal teams have a lot of flexibility to travel, to go to places where we can pivot quickly as appropriate and send teams in to do specific builds. And so, we have a plan to use both internal and external effectively, so we don't buy into one or the other. I think if we can get the right cost, and we believe we have them on external, that's the fastest way to scale, and that's where we're moving the majority of our work to. But we'll never give up our internal construction team. On…

Kenneth Gunderman

Analyst · New Street Research.

David, just to build on John's comments on the build and philosophy there. We've said for several quarters now leading up to this pivot to more external that our build costs would increase. So going from that historically low $600 to $650, all internal that we were going to make the sacrifice to let that cost per passing increase some. But the benefit of that would be that we bring all the things John just said about the benefit and able to build more faster. We think that trade-off is well worth it. So, to your philosophical point, that's where we land. Let's bring in a good mix as opposed to doing it 100% internal. Yes, you spend a little bit more per passing, but all the benefits that John just mentioned accrue eventually to the bottom line.

Operator

Operator

And our next question will come from Brendan Lynch with Barclays.

Brendan Lynch

Analyst

Just on Kinetic home passings, you're a little below the pace that you originally anticipated, but expect to kind of recapture that original trajectory in 2026. Can you just walk us through what you expect to change next year to help you get back on track?

John Harrobin

Analyst

Yes. I mean we're below, as Kenny mentioned, a slight bit, but we expect to catch up in the first quarter. That's simply a timing issue. After the merger close, we realized that not all projects that were designed and ready to go. We secured the crews external to go build them. Not all the projects were permitted, and we ran into delays on permits and locates, particularly in those subsidized markets where we're new to the area and we don't have any existing experience or facilities. This is not a Kinetic problem. As you know, permitting is an industry-wide problem. There's a lot of support and efforts to streamline the permitting process. We support U.S. telecom and other institutions that are going after that. I know there's potential EOs on the table as well, which we're supportive of and the FCC has been a good advocate for reform here. That said, relative to permitting and facilities, we have visibility to every project, where we are in that pipeline, how to get ahead of it, the timing now and this is easy to resolve, and we're already knocking down some obstacles. We took our team that really did a good job on our subsidized build planning and winning a lot of great subsidized build and pivoted them to solely focus on managing our permitting and locate motion. And the velocity there has increased in September and October consecutively. We've set an internal record on number of permits cleared, not that, that means anything in the -- when it comes to build plans, but we know that we're clearing the decks for the teams to roll. So that's why we're really confident that in first quarter, we'll catch up.

Brendan Lynch

Analyst

Great. That's helpful. And then, Kenny, you kind of teased multiple dwelling units as a growth opportunity. Maybe just help us understand why that wasn't part of the plan in the past and what's changing to make it part of the plan now?

Kenneth Gunderman

Analyst

Yes. Great question. I'm going to start and then turn it to John to pile on, Brendan. So, look, I think the short answer is it just wasn't a priority because there were so many other priorities that were being focused on, number one. But number two, I think that we've talked many times about bringing in fresh leadership, a fresh set of eyes, a proven playbook. This is one of those great examples of how with John coming in and taking a look at where we were focusing, where our resources were targeted and just servicing the concept that, "Hey, this was a big opportunity at prior companies. And here, it's a big opportunity as well, and we don't have the resources next to it that we should. And on a go-forward basis, we're going to." So, it's just really a question of leadership and priorities.

John Harrobin

Analyst

No, I think that's well said. At Verizon, I manage the MDU business and you kind of have to win there in Verizon. I mean, with New York City, Boston and other large cities, you kind of have to nail that. And then at Kinetic, there really wasn't investment there. So, we kind of built it from the ground up. And to this day, I mean, at Frontier, I think it's delivering double-digit nets every single quarter right now in terms of customer growth. So, once you get it rolling, it's really strong and the IRRs are really even higher than single family business. So, I'm very bullish on it. It will take a little bit to build, but we'll get it done. You've got to have the right motion, if you will, and leadership. You also have the right product. We have the right product. In fact, our EOR deal that we just announced has certain MDU and community capabilities that we can use to deliver effectively on that segment. So, we're going to get after this. And it might take a few quarters or a year to really show the results. But once we get involved there, I know that we will succeed.

Operator

Operator

And the next question will come from Matthew Griffiths with Bank of America.

Matthew Griffiths

Analyst

I want to ask on the fiber -- consumer fiber ARPU. You mentioned in the comments explaining the kind of sequential down move was caused by price adjustments and net adds. So, I was wondering to what extent kind of your comments on churn kind of impacted the move in ARPU? And then on the net add side, are you finding that the kind of incremental net add is coming in at an increasingly lower ARPU? Or was this just something within the quarter that we may not see repeat? An added color there would be great.

John Harrobin

Analyst

Yes, Matthew, astute question, and I'll answer the first part. And then on the second part with new customers, it may sound like I'm circling the airport, but I promise I'll land the plane and answer your question. Yes, there's a correlation between churn and ARPU. I mean, we have very high churn and among the best -- highest ARPUs in the category. I mean, 10% year-over-year on top of an already high ARPU in the category. I mean that's something that we need to really understand, and I spent a lot of time initially understanding that. The high ARPU that we have is in part due to our market profile, which is, I believe, is very attractive and distinct. But the 10% year-over-year is really a result of multiple across-the-board price ups over the past 18 months. And just like with copper customers, we're going to get more surgical here. We're going to drive more for more and really use the speed ladder to move customers up the speed ladder to drive ARPU higher. And we have a massive opportunity there. 65% of our fiber base is on plans that are less than 1 gig. This is, again, similar to the Frontier playbook. Just about a month ago, we launched 2 gigs to 85% of our footprint. And already new customer take rates there are in the double digits. We're going to introduce more value-added services to sell more services to customers, not only to drive more ARPU, but also, we know the more services customers purchase from us, the lower the churn is for those customers. And also, a contributor to ARPU is using credits more effectively. We put more controls on the use of credits over the last 60 days, and we've now aligned rep or retention rep compensation with net retained revenue. So, you want to qualify the customer, rightsize them and you don't have to drop all the way to the bottom in terms of saving the customer. You asked about new customers. And I'm always reminded of Moffet's characterization a couple of years ago, we really captured the essence of our category's new customer promo strategy. He think he characterized it, and this is almost exact words, like "It's really value deferred, not forgone." And for years, and this works, the industry brings in new customers at a lower rate because it reflects the natural ability to move customers up the speed ladder, sell more services and deploy inflationary price increases. We embrace that notion. We've changed our go-to-market recently, like I mentioned before, to take advantage of that. And so, we have specific plans to grow ARPU using the 4 levers that we always use, speed ladder, value-added services, inflationary price increases and use of credits. And while it might not be -- it won't be 10% on a sustainable basis, we do believe there's a path to durable ARPU growth.

Operator

Operator

I show no further questions in the queue at this time. This does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.