Uniti Group Inc. (NASDAQ:UNIT) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call February 24, 2023 8:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Kenny Gunderman - Chief Executive Officer
Paul Bullington - Chief Financial Officer, Senior Vice President & Treasurer
Conference Call Participants
Bora Lee - RBC
David Barden - Bank of America
Rob Palmisano - Raymond James
Operator
Welcome to Uniti Group's Fourth Quarter 2022 Conference Call. My name is Jonathan and I will be your operator for today. A webcast of this call will be available on the company's website, www.uniti.com, beginning today, and will remain available for 14 days. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Participants on the call will have the opportunity to ask questions following the company’s prepared comments.
The company would like to remind you that today's remarks include forward-looking statements and actual results could differ materially from those projected in these statements. The factors that could cause actual results to differ are discussed in the company's filings with the SEC. The company's remarks this morning will reference slides posted on its website, and you are encouraged to refer to those materials during this call.
Discussions during this call will also include certain financial measures that were not prepared in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Reconciliation of those non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in the company's current report on Form 8-K dated today.
I would now like to turn the call over to Uniti Group's Chief Executive Officer, Kenny Gunderman. Please go ahead, Mr. Gunderman.
Kenny Gunderman
Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining. Starting on slide three, I wanted to briefly cover our key accomplishments in 2022 and our priorities for 2023. I'm very pleased with how we executed on our disciplined growth plan throughout 2022.
The growth of broadband continues to accelerate and is being fueled by fiber. Uniti's core IP backbone peaked at around 30 gigs in 2017 and grew to approximately 100 gigs just before the pandemic.
As of last week, our IP backbone peaked at 300 gigs, a 10 times increase from just six years ago. We expect this acceleration to continue across both our IP and transport networks, especially given that three out of our four wireless carriers, where some of our largest customer -- consumers of capacity are just beginning to upgrade towers from 1-gig to 10-gig.