Uniti’s Kinetic says it has the right MDU broadband product

The service provider has put in a foundation to pursue the MDU broadband market. In October, Kinetic announced an agreement with eero to provide consumers with whole-home Wi-Fi 7 connectivity.

“Our eero deal that we just announced has certain MDU and community capabilities that we can use to deliver effectively on the MDU broadband segment,” Harrobin said. “We're going to get after this. And it might take a few quarters or a year to really show the results. But once we get involved there, I know that we will succeed.”

Fiber overtaking DSL revenues

Like other service providers with traditional ILEC roots, Uniti has a long way to go to overcome ongoing declines in its legacy copper-based DSL business segment; the service provider is seeing fiber becoming a more dominant source of revenue.

Kinetic Consumer fiber revenue grew 26% year-over-year during the quarter to $183.3 million.

“By the end of this year, more of our consumer customers at Kinetic will be on fiber than on legacy networks,” said Kenny Gunderman, CEO of Uniti. “And by the second quarter of next year, Kinetic's consumer fiber revenue will exceed DSL revenue. By the end of next year, consolidated fiber revenue will exceed 50% for the entire company.”

Today, nearly 80% of Uniti’s total revenue is from its core fiber businesses, while nearly 40% of its total revenue for the entire company and  Kinetic is from fiber.

During the quarter, Kinetic continued to make progress with its fiber strategy. The service provider passed an additional 56,000 homes with fiber, ending the quarter with 1.8 million homes passed.

Kinetic also added 24,000 new fiber subscribers during the third quarter, ending the quarter with 507,000 total fiber subscribers.

The service provider expects to end the year with approximately 536,000 fiber subs and realize approximately $500 million of consumer fiber revenue in 2025, an increase of roughly 25% from the prior year.

Uniti has reset its expectations to pass 1.9 million homes from 2 million by the end of the year, which would bring fiber coverage within the Kinetic footprint to 42%.

“With respect to our previous target of 2 million homes, we expect to fully catch up in 2026,” said Paul Bullington, CFO of Uniti.

Enhancing fiber ARPU

Along with seeing an uptick in reaching new locations with fiber and an uptick in subscribers, Kinetic consumer fiber ARPU also rose during the quarter.

Uniti’s consumer fiber ARPU of $75.81 is up 10% year-over-year in the third quarter.

Harrobin said that Uniti will look for opportunities to enhance its fiber customer base by offering more speed options. “We're going to drive more for more and really use the speed ladder to move customers up the speed ladder to drive ARPU higher,” he said. “And we have a massive opportunity there because today 65% of our fiber base is on plans that are less than 1 gig.”

Uniti’s speed plans appear to be working to enhance its broadband ARPU levels. Since it launched its 2 Gbps tier to 85% of its fiber broadband footprint, the company is seeing double-digit take rates.

“We're going to introduce more value-added services to sell more services to customers, not only to drive more ARPU, but also, we know the more services customers purchase from us, the lower the churn is for those customers,” Harrobin said. “Another contributor to ARPU is using credits more effectively. We put more controls on the use of credits over the last 60 days, and we've now aligned rep or retention rep compensation with net retained revenue.”

Overall, Kinetic contributed $360.3 million of revenues and $155.4 million of contribution margin for the third quarter of 2025, achieving margins of approximately 43%. Kinetic’s net capital expenditure during the quarter was $147.7 million.

For related articles, visit the Broadband Topic Center.
For more information on high-speed transmission systems and suppliers, visit the Lightwave Buyer’s Guide.
To stay abreast of fiber network deployments, subscribe to Lightwave’s Service Providers and Datacom/Data Center newsletters.