Richard Choe
JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division

My name is Richard Choe. I cover Communications Infrastructure for JPMorgan. I would like to introduce Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO of Uniti Group. Thank you for joining us today.

Kenneth Gunderman
President, CEO & Director

Richard, it's a pleasure to be here as always. Thanks for having us.

Richard Choe
JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division

We were here about a year ago, and you had a lot going on at the time, but I think even more has happened. So can you give us a quick update on what's changed over the past year and kind of where are things today?

Kenneth Gunderman
President, CEO & Director

Yes. We definitely had a lot going on then. We had announced our merger with Windstream, but it had not yet closed. And so we were still talking about all the benefits of the merger and trying to convince folks of the strategic rationale. And that included our ability to accelerate the fiber build at Kinetic. That included our ability to go after the wholesale fiber opportunity by combining the Windstream Wholesale business with our Uniti Fiber Wholesale business.

That included synergies, obviously, corporate and cost savings synergies on-net, off-net synergies, but also very importantly, removing the complexity of the MLA relationship that existed, which we also foreshadowed thought that could also mean cost of capital improvements. And then we also thought the merger would put us in a better position to be leaning into strategic options. So that was the promise. And now that we're a year