Shentel reported a strong start to 2025, fueled by accelerating subscriber and revenue growth in its Glo Fiber markets as it enters the final phase of a multi-year fiber expansion initiative.
“We are pleased with our results for the first quarter of 2025 with growth or subscriber improvements across all lines of business,” said President and CEO Christopher French during the company’s first quarter earnings call. “We had another solid quarter of rapid growth in our Glo Fiber expansion markets.”
Shentel added 5,400 new Glo Fiber customers during the quarter, and added 16,600 new passings, resulting in a 52% year-over-year revenue increase from those markets.
As Shentel nears the end of its investment-heavy expansion phase, scheduled to conclude in late 2026, it highlighted the profitability of mature fiber markets. French pointed to over 51,000 customers from markets launched between Q4 2019 and Q3 2023 who are now yielding significant returns.
“These mature cohorts generated free cash flow margins of over 40% during the first quarter of 2025 after considering the cost to connect new customers and maintenance CapEx,” said French. “We expect these free cash flow margins to expand as we approach our average terminal penetration rate of 37%. We believe this is an underappreciated value of our business and will be a catalyst for share price appreciation.”
Financial performance
Chief Financial Officer James Volk reported first quarter revenues of $87.9 million, a 27% year-over-year increase. Legacy Flo Fiber markets grew $5.6 million, despite a $2.2 million decline in incumbent broadband revenue.
Adjusted EBITDA rose 43% to $27.6 million.
“Adjusted EBITDA margins increased from 28% in the first quarter of 2024 to 31% in the first quarter 2025,” said Volk, “driven by the high incremental margins of adding Glo Fiber subscribers and an additional $2.8 million of Horizon and synergy savings being realized.”
Customer growth
Chief Operating Officer Ed McKay reported that Glo Fiber’s customer totals reached 71,000 in Q1, up 51% year over year. Broadband data penetration in Glo Fiber expansion markets rose to 19.4%. Total broadband data penetration grew from 18% in Q1 2024 to 19.4% in Q1 2025.
McKay also reported a growing demand for speed, with 49% of residential subscribers adopting speeds of 1 Gbps or higher, and 7% taking 2 Gbps or higher.
Shentel added more than 500 data broadband subscribers from additions in government-subsidized markets, and ended the quarter with about 112,000 broadband data customers, up 2.7% year-over-year.
McKay reported that churn declined to 1.36% while broadband ARPU held at $83.
Looking forward
Shentel invested $76 million in capital expenditures in Q1 and expects full-year capex to be between $250 million and $280 million.
McKay reported that, so far, Shentel has not been impacted by tariffs and the company doesn’t expect to see a significant impact on future construction costs.
“Materials and equipment only account for about 20% of our overall capital investments in 2025,” said McKay. “The vast majority of the fiber and associated construction materials we use are manufactured in the United States, and we have about eight months’ worth of construction materials in our warehouses.”
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Hayden Beeson
Hayden Beeson is a writer and editor with over seven years of experience in a variety of industries. Prior to joining Lightwave and Broadband Technology Report, he was the associate editor of Architectural SSL and LEDs Magazine.