Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim
Speaker 1: Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: Let's talk utility, is Matt. When I think of utilities,
Speaker 2: or when I think most people, they think of water,
Speaker 2: you know, electricity that you know, the bills you pay
Speaker 2: every month. I wan't go throw a broadband in there.
Speaker 2: I mean, when you put it on the to do
Speaker 2: list of utilities, you got to pay every month. Broadbands
Speaker 2: right up there. Yeah, when the power goes out, what's
Speaker 2: the biggest concern you have, I can't charge my phone
Speaker 2: exactly so, and if people are all huddled in the
Speaker 2: Starbucks and things like that. But a lot of the country,
Speaker 2: some of the country is still not served by really
Speaker 2: good broadband. There's a company out there that's trying to
Speaker 2: fix that. US Cellular, and we have the president's CEO
Speaker 2: of laurent uh their re All, who goes by the
Speaker 2: nickname of LT. We're gonna go that makes things out
Speaker 2: like that, Yeah, that makes it. He's here in New
Speaker 2: York Giants country here we like the LT. He's a
Speaker 2: president CEO of US Cellular. It joins us on Zoom
Speaker 2: from Chicago.
Speaker 1: And a Bob Mold fan apparently really, I'm a huge
Speaker 1: fan of Bob Mould. I mean, I loved Who's Kerdo
Speaker 1: when I was a kid. But when I lived in
Speaker 1: Berlin a couple of years ago, I was so happy
Speaker 1: to learn that he lived there too, and I got
Speaker 1: to drop in on a couple of very small shows.
Speaker 1: I'm talking like forty fifty people.
Speaker 2: You got to tell me who was Bob Holt?
Speaker 1: He was the lead singer of whosker Do and now
Speaker 1: he has a great solo career.
Speaker 2: No no idea, Okay, no idea?
Speaker 1: What eltea?
Speaker 2: We're going to move on from that. LT, so talk
Speaker 2: to us about kind of where we are in the
Speaker 2: deployment of decent quality broadband across this country. Where are
Speaker 2: we today and where do you guys need to take it?
Speaker 3: Maybe so you reference to the concept of a utility,
Speaker 3: and one of the things that the pandemic in particularly
Speaker 3: really laid bare was just how critical broadband and broadband
Speaker 3: connectivity is.
Speaker 4: The numbers can be debated, but generally you.
Speaker 3: Can think of over ten million Americans as not having
Speaker 3: access to high speed, high quality broadband. That definition is
Speaker 3: you can think of it as there's two definitions. The
Speaker 3: government uses unserved and underserved Americans. Underserved is below under
Speaker 3: getting access to one hundred megabet connection unserved as you've
Speaker 3: got less than twenty five megabits. The key number is
Speaker 3: you've got at least ten million Americans who don't have access.
Speaker 4: And I have twin daughters. We went through the pandemic.
Speaker 3: With them doing school from home, and I can't imagine
Speaker 3: how difficult it would have been for them to thrive
Speaker 3: and survive without high quality broadband.
Speaker 4: And so it's a national issue. It's also a very
Speaker 4: personal issue for our business.
Speaker 3: So our business, we're a wireless company, we focus primarily
Speaker 3: on rural America. We're the fourth largest wireless business in
Speaker 3: the United States, four billion dollar revenue, five million subscribers.
Speaker 3: We connect our customers throughout the US, but our focus
Speaker 3: is somewhat more on rural America. The largest city is
Speaker 3: that our network covers, or cities like Milwaukee or Tulsa,
Speaker 3: and so mostly we focus on covering people who sometimes
Speaker 3: don't have access to the atts and the verieton.
Speaker 2: So what's the technology, lt what's the tech technology? When
Speaker 2: I got to rule America, I'm talking rural America, and
Speaker 2: you know, the phone companies or the cable companies aren't
Speaker 2: going to string wires up, they're not going to dig
Speaker 2: up the ground. What's the technology? Can you explain to
Speaker 2: technology that gets broadband to those parts of the country.
Speaker 3: So generally you would have access through one of three things.
Speaker 3: Currently you would have access if you have a phone
Speaker 3: company DSL, which obviously is a very low quality kind
Speaker 3: of signal. Maybe you could have access to satellite, which
Speaker 3: has a lot of challenges in and of itself. We've
Speaker 3: been rolling out of technology called fixed wireless Access. We're
Speaker 3: very excited about it. It uses the existing mobile infrastructure,
Speaker 3: so think things like mobile towers, and what we use
Speaker 3: is the radios on those towers that currently serve mobile
Speaker 3: phones in the area. We dedicate a portion of that
Speaker 3: radio capacity to serving homes and to serving businesses, and
Speaker 3: so we're connecting people that without us would not be connected.
Speaker 3: We've seen a ton of uptake of the technology, so
Speaker 3: we've doubled our subscriber base on this over eighteen months.
Speaker 3: We're about to cross one hundred thousand subscribers. It's a
Speaker 3: great way to connect rural America. It's not isolated to
Speaker 3: rural Some of our competitors are also pushing it in
Speaker 3: urban markets. It's a really interesting way to connect homes
Speaker 3: and businesses that maybe in the past wouldn't have had accidents.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was actually last week I was talking with
Speaker 1: John Scully about this, and he's the CEO of AT
Speaker 1: and T, and I think for a while they weren't
Speaker 1: to end of the technology. Now they're fully behind it.
Speaker 1: So what's your competition, like, I mean, do they go
Speaker 1: out to those places as well or is it sort
Speaker 1: of two small potatoes to them to try and connect
Speaker 1: these people. What's it like fighting against a giant like telephone.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, it's interesting that you mentioned it right now.
Speaker 3: Our competition isn't there we're worried about with this technology,
Speaker 3: with the fixed wireless technology is connecting people that without
Speaker 3: it aren't connected. And so we actually don't compete too
Speaker 3: much against the Atts and the rises and the T
Speaker 3: mobiles in the space. We're all trying to figure out
Speaker 3: how to bring these types of connections to the home
Speaker 3: into the business in a way that's economical. The challenge
Speaker 3: that I face and John Stankey from AT and T
Speaker 3: faces it, as does Verizon, as does T Mobile. What
Speaker 3: we face is the challenge of how to connect people economically,
Speaker 3: we want.
Speaker 4: To connect these folks. These are not people that either.
Speaker 3: We, the wireless carriers or our wireline competitors want to
Speaker 3: leave behind the challenges. It's really difficult, it's really expensive
Speaker 3: to connect these folks. And in DC there's a program
Speaker 3: Bad the Bad Program and portion of the Infrastructure Investment
Speaker 3: in Jobs Act. It's taking forty six billion dollars and
Speaker 3: it's putting it towards connecting unconnected Americans, which is fantastic.
Speaker 3: The challenge is that there's also a vision in DC
Speaker 3: of let's connect everyone with fiber. And that sounds great
Speaker 3: when you're sitting in an office building in DC. When
Speaker 3: you spend time in rural America the way I do,
Speaker 3: and you pass through farmhouses in Iowa or ranches in Wyoming,
Speaker 3: it's very difficult to connect.
Speaker 4: Those homes those businesses with fiber.
Speaker 3: And that's where our technology comes in, and we think
Speaker 3: we have a way to combine fiber and fixed wireless
Speaker 3: and the forty six billion dollars that's coming from the
Speaker 3: government and to truly connect every single American.
Speaker 4: That's not been something that's been.
Speaker 3: Possible in the past, and now it can be a
Speaker 3: reality because of the combination of the technology that we're
Speaker 3: bringing to the table as well as the funding with
Speaker 3: the government's offer.
Speaker 2: But that's not cheap lt. I'm looking at the FA
Speaker 2: function the Bloomberg terminal, which has financial analysis, and I
Speaker 2: see capex of you know, six hundred and fifty seven
Speaker 2: hundred million dollars a year. You've got you know, four
Speaker 2: billion dollars of kind of net debt on the balance sheet,
Speaker 2: you know, less than a billion dollars of ebitita. So
Speaker 2: how do you finance this going forty I don't have
Speaker 2: you free cash flow positive here. I'm not sure, but
Speaker 2: you're right about it. So how are you going to
Speaker 2: finance a continued growth here?
Speaker 3: So that's really where the government infrastructure comes in. It
Speaker 3: costs between six hundred and fifty thousand to a million
Speaker 3: dollars to put a cell tower in rural America. In
Speaker 3: order to break even on that cell tower, I have
Speaker 3: to have between two to three hundred fixed wireless customers
Speaker 3: within seven kilometers of that tower.
Speaker 4: That math doesn't work right now.
Speaker 3: If you've got two hundred and fifty to three hundred
Speaker 3: customers in a fairly dense area, we'll have them connected.
Speaker 3: The challenge is people who are more sparse, and so
Speaker 3: we're working with states to take these infrastructure dollars and
Speaker 3: help us bring the cost that we have to bear
Speaker 3: of that tower from between six hundred and fifty two
Speaker 3: a million. If I can bring that cost down to
Speaker 3: two hundred down to one hundred, all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: I can connect a lot more Americans, and I can
Speaker 3: with simply the dollars on.
Speaker 4: Our balance sheet.
Speaker 3: The other benefit that comes along with it, by the way,
Speaker 3: is that when we put that tower in rural America
Speaker 3: and I send my engineers up to connect homes and
Speaker 3: businesses with fixed wireless, we don't just do it with
Speaker 3: fixed wireless. We're also putting our five G mobile spectrum
Speaker 3: and mobile radios up on top of that tower. So
Speaker 3: now we're connecting that whole area with mobile five G.
Speaker 3: People want to be connected on their mobile phones the
Speaker 3: same way we want to be connected in their homes
Speaker 3: and their businesses.
Speaker 4: And we can do both.
Speaker 1: What's the next what's the next thing LT after five G?
Speaker 1: I mean, I assume it's going to be called six G.
Speaker 1: But is there something that's going to be more connective
Speaker 1: and more easy and easy, easier to deal with the.
Speaker 3: Path for our industry has always been you put more
Speaker 3: capacity out there for people to use, more capabilities out
Speaker 3: there for people to use, and they will find a
Speaker 3: way to use it. And so both we and our
Speaker 3: competitors and other folks in the industry, we're starting to
Speaker 3: think about sixty. The more important thing, I think is
Speaker 3: the capabilities that we're going to provide higher speeds, the
Speaker 3: ability to connect millions and billions of devices to our network,
Speaker 3: so truly allowing this network of sensors to take and
Speaker 3: finally bringing latency them. And so if you think about
Speaker 3: things like drones right now, running a drone outside of
Speaker 3: line of sight is very difficult.
Speaker 4: Connectivity.
Speaker 2: We can do that, all right, LT, thank you so
Speaker 2: much for joining us.
Speaker 4: LT.
Speaker 2: Theravoll, President, CEO of US, leader joining us on Zoom
Speaker 2: from Chicago,