Gigapower passes 1.6million homes now

Transcript from yesterday's Deutsche Bank 2016 Conference "Matthew Niknam Okay. One other I guess initiative that’s ongoing is the fiber builds. You’ve talked about drawing fiber to 14 million premises over the next few years. Can you give us an update on how that’s proceeding? And then specifically I guess a lot of the benefit people really think about usually is just faster speeds for the customer, but have you been able to leverage or do you expect to leverage these investments in other parts of your business? John Stephens Absolutely. So on a factual basis, I think we are at 1.6 million homes passed with fiber today. It’s about 20 markets across the country; we have plans to go to 56 major markets. We have an FCC commitment as part of the DTV deal to do 12.5 million additional fiber locations. And so we will certainly live up to that in the next four years. That’s certainly well within our CapEx expectations. It does give great broadband or great speeds and connectivity. It does give great opportunities to deliver video over the top or whatever, but quite frankly when you build these out, you have this opportunity then to connect businesses that go by this platform as you build these in the neighborhoods out, you go by the small businesses, you go by the large businesses, you can take advantage of this fiber to then do backhaul for your cell sites, to do DAZ, to do small cells. So when we build these things, we look at it on a holistic basis and yes, on the front end it may take a little bit more investment, but when you think about the efficiency that you can get multiple uses out of this fiber backbone or these connecting points, it is really much more efficient and provides much more value. And we do that with everything we do. We do it when we take fiber to the business customer locations, we always evaluate whether or not just putting the fiber there on the EMUX, the electronics equipment, but whether we should run a DAZ through the building right there at the start and make sure our Wireless business gets coverage. So it is a normal prod. Our network guys are really good about holistically viewing our integrated carrier status and it makes it a lot more efficient."