Philip Cusick: So you said no outcome or implications, but is there anything you can say about timing in terms of where we are and when we might hear something.
Vicki Villacrez: Yes. Thanks, Phil. Thanks for the question to both of you. It is an opportunity for us to reiterate our comments. Our announcement on August 4, we are focused on all strategic options that are in the best interest of the company and its shareholders. And this process is active and ongoing. That’s all I can comment on right now. And I’m not going to comment on the timing or speculate on the timing either. Thank you.
Philip Cusick: I feel it’s worth a shot. Okay. So real question, LT, you’re pretty clearly paring back on mobile spending, accepting the slower gross adds that come with that. Does it make sense to pull back further on sales and marketing, especially in a quarter where the noise volume will be high from here to save even more money given the strategic review? And also are you paring back on CapEx as well near term because of the review as well?
Laurent Therivel: So what we try to do as we think about balancing our promotional spend is matching, right, the volume of that spend to the available volume in the marketplace. Fourth quarter, right, because of holiday is when we see most — the highest level, certainly switching activity. And we need to match that available switching activity with as much volume as we can put in the marketplace. And so I’m not adjusting our promotional spend or our capital spend based on any potential outcomes of the strategic review. What we’re doing is we’re adjusting that spend based on what we see as the dynamics in the marketplace. In the third quarter, we saw an opportunity to pull back a little bit in terms of spending, and you see that in our strong financial performance.
We see there is going to be an opportunity in the fourth quarter, particularly on the upgrade side to ramp up our volumes. And so we plan on aggressively pursuing those. As far as capital goes, the capital moves have really been driven by two factors. The first factor is we’re very comfortable with the results of our 5G modernization program. We now have 5G active on sites that carry 80% of our traffic. And Mike and team have done a really nice job of rolling that out. And so what we’re able to do is we’re able to slow our capital spending associated with 5G, while at the same time, we’re replacing some of that spending with mid band. We mentioned it on the call, we got early access to that C-band spectrum. Where we roll that out, we see really strong mobile performance and it helps us sell a better fixed wireless product.
And so much of that slowdown in CapEx that’s associated with 5G is being replaced by acceleration of mid band. And the net of it is what you see in both in our numbers for this year and thinking about next year, fairly similar capital spend as well. So CapEx and promotional approach really driven by marketplace dynamics not being influenced by the strategic assessment.
Philip Cusick: Okay. Thank you. And then one for Michelle, if I can. Can you dig more into the competition in the ILEC markets? Is that cable footprint expansion you’re alluding to or maybe fixed wireless? I’m a little surprised that ACAM funding can be used to defend yourself against cable incursion. Is that what’s going on?
Michelle Brukwicki : Hi, Phil. Thanks a lot for the question. Yes, so in our ILEC, we are facing a little bit more of a competitive pressure than we had in prior years. And it’s not primarily coming from fixed wireless. Cable is always a tough competitor for us, but it’s starting to be some of the smaller fiber over builders are starting to come into some of our ILEC markets. And so we have been very focused on our ILEC for the last decade. We’ve been building fiber in our ILEC and so we’ve got 40% of our ILEC fibered up right now. We have goals to continue that. And that’s a really great way to defend and compete in those markets. And we do see that the E-ACAM program once we get those builds going, those are going to be fiber builds. And that will also be a way that helps us defend those ILEC markets from those fiber over builders from potentially coming any farther or entering in the first place.
Philip Cusick: Okay, thank you.
Colleen Thompson : Thanks, Phil. Next question.
Operator: Thank you. We go next now to Simon Flannery at Morgan Stanley.
Simon Flannery: Great, thank you very much. Good morning. LT, just following on, on the FWA. Good results continue there. Could you just give us a little bit on the profile of these customers, where they’re coming from? Is this in kind of more suburbia, are you seeing in more rural areas? What’s the kind of the sweet spot here for that customer base? And then just coming back to the point you were making about the competitiveness in wireless, cables being aggressive for some time. I mean their adds have sort of leveled out here for a few quarters. Were you seeing something new? Was it more players in your markets? Or what was the delta here in the last few months that you were kind of trying to highlight? And then maybe just one last one on the fiber side. The slower build, are you going to concentrate more your builds next year on in or out of region on the fiber side?
Laurent Therivel: Thanks, Simon, and kudos to you for not trying to slip in a strategic assessment question. We appreciate it.
Simon Flannery: I give up.
Laurent Therivel: Yeah, no, it was appreciated. Yes. Let me start with fixed wireless. Interestingly enough, we actually see a fairly decent blend of customers. I mean, I’ll remind again, right, this is a low-band product almost exclusive we’ve been selling on thus far, which would lead you to believe that it would skew heavily rural, where the primary competition is satellite or DSL. And interestingly enough, I mean, we’ve seen a really good blend of customers, which would — there’s no switching information out there. So we don’t know if they you’re switching a number over. So we don’t know exactly who they’re coming from or if they’re necessarily adding maybe a backup connection. So we don’t know where they’re coming from.
