Kenneth Gunderman: David, thanks. I’ll try to hit all these, but keep me honest. Yes, on carrier spending, I mentioned it in our prepared remarks that we expected spending to be down this year, coming into the year, frankly. I mean, we tend to get a 6-, 9-, 12-month early view into carrier spending, just given our day-to-day interaction with them, it’s never perfect, but it can change quickly. But generally, we get that early view and so when we gave guidance at the beginning of the year, we had expected bookings for the wireless carriers to be down 50% compared to 2022. So that was baked into the cake when we gave guidance. And so as a result, we’re not changing any outlook for this year, and that’s not going to impact guidance.
I think that the slowdown is different for the various carriers. We’ve got some who had a hard push to meet some imposed deadlines. You’ve got others who are reaching the end of — almost reaching the end of 10 gig upgrades and you’ve got others who are changing capital allocation policies. And so it’s really not an industry. I wouldn’t characterize it from our vantage point, is an industry theme, so much is carrier-specific changes, and they all just seem to be happening around the same time. And with that said, we don’t think this is a systemic slowdown. It’s going to pick back up. There’s still a lot of investment that needs to be made in these networks, including just traditional backhaul to towers, fully lighting and deploying spectrum, but then also eventually densifying more of the markets around the country.
I think there’s a lot of money that’s been spent in Tier 1 markets on small cells. But as we’ve mentioned many times, we think that trend is going to happen in the Tier 2 and 3 markets. And we think that’s been — we’re just scratching the surface on that today and I think when that comes, there’s going to be a big opportunity for Uniti. So Longer term, the carrier spending is going to come back. And I don’t know exactly when that’s going to be, but it’s going to come back. The one point I would add to that, David, and we’ve mentioned this a number of times, but we’re diversified across different customer segments and use cases for fiber. And so that’s one of the reasons why the slowdown in carrier spending this year is not impacting our mid-single-digit growth.
I mean — and over the past couple of years, including this year, wireless bookings have represented somewhere between 10% to 15% of total bookings for us. So it just suggests that we’re diversified across a lot of different use cases. Yes, on the lead cable, I think you’re right. There’s above-board remediation challenges that may exist, we think, like I said, that those should be [indiscernible]. But then there’s also — I’ll use your term, the ambulance chasers I think what’s important from our vantage point, and I think the rest of the industry has embraced this as well is that we just have to take this issue very seriously. We have to prioritize the health and safety of our employees and the public and really lean into this with regulators, state and local officials respond to any request that we get, be very transparent.
And ultimately, we think the facts will speak for themselves. It kind of feels like we’re moving out of the hysteria phase around it and now more into the education and learning phase. And frankly, we think that’s going to be very revealing to people. Again, we have no credible evidence that these cables pose a risk or a material risk. And then we’ll move into the remediation phase if you will call it that. And I don’t again, based on everything we’re seeing, we don’t consider this to be a material issue. We’re not going to be a leader in setting the discourse around this. We’re going to be a fast follower. We’re going to follow what AT&T and Verizon and the trade associations are saying, we’re not directly exposed to it ourselves, as I mentioned in our prepared remarks, but we’re going to continue to monitor it very closely and interact very closely with the industry and with our sale-leaseback to us, including Windstream and so forth.
