The senior executives of Consolidated Communications, a broadband and commercial communications service provider in the United States, made optimistic predictions about the future prospects of the company’s fiber-based business, while lowering the expectations of its expansion pace.

Fred Grafham, the new CFO of Consolidated, said that the company’s strategic business areas – including consumer broadband, commercial and operator data transmission – had achieved healthy revenue growth, which to some extent offset the decline in the company’s revenue from other services such as voice and video. As the company invests in optical fiber infrastructure, these strategic business areas will drive the growth of revenue and EBITDA by 2024.
Consolidated officially launched the strategy of transforming into an optical fiber provider in 2021, established its subsidiary, Fidium Fiber, and planned to upgrade 70% of the copper infrastructure to gigabit optical fiber. In 2022, Fiber Fiber added 40100 new optical fiber users, doubling the number of new users in 2021. The company has further built 400000 optical fiber locations, making its coverage more than 1 million, accounting for 38% of its target market. By the end of 2022, Consolidated has about 123000 consumer optical broadband users, with a penetration rate of 12%.
The initial goal of Consolidated is to upgrade 70% of its network to optical network by 2025. However, the company now postponed this goal to the middle of 2026 and lowered its expansion goal for the next year. This move was to some extent expected. The recent report shows that due to the inflationary pressure and the billions of dollars of federal funds to be allocated in 2025, several service providers including Consolidated will reduce their optical fiber targets in 2023. Earlier this month, Cowen’s financial analysts reduced their estimate of the consolidated 2023 optical fiber construction from 400000 to 350000.
Consolidated said that the company’s goal this year is to “add at least 225000 optical fiber locations”. The company expects that by 2026, the number of optical fiber users will increase to more than 500000, reaching 25% of its target of 2 million.