“Over time, we expect our rural construction initiative to be a significant contributor to our customer growth with attractive mid- to high-teen internal rates of return.”

In context

“yond and offers good growth and returns to visibility. We hope to complete our RDOF build ahead of the original commitment, and that faster completion is good for our returns, the communities where we build, obviously, and it creates credibility for future subsidized builds and option value for future growth. As we also mentioned in December, we've been successful in winning a number of other state and local grants in 2022 and expect the same in 2023. And we expect, assuming a reasonable regulatory framework, to participate in the $42.5 billion BEAD program. The initial results of our rural construction initiative have been very promising. We constructed over 200,000 new rural passings in 2022, and penetration of passings open at least six months is ahead of our expectations at about 40%. Over time, we expect our rural construction initiative to be a significant contributor to our customer growth with attractive mid- to high-teen internal rates of return. And finally, we remain focused on executing on our core operating strategy, all to further improve customer experience, raise customer satisfaction and drive customer growth. We're doing that in a number of ways, including the continued digitization of our customer service model in ways that enhance the customer experience, accelerating our proactive maintenance initiative to address service issues before customers even see an impairment and investing in training and tenure for our employees to continue to improve our service and sales capabilities. Longer tenure leads to better execution with higher sales, lower service transactions, lower churn and more products per customer over time. So we have a large growth opportunity in front of us through network evolution, convergence and contin”