Where a broadband CFO earns her place at the table

Our capital spending was 35 per cent of revenue in 2025, against about 16 per cent for maintenance and customer connections alone, so the fibre programme is the largest judgement our board makes each year. I model it town by town. The cost of upgrading a location depends less on the fibre than on the poles: make-ready work, attachment rents and an electric cooperative's own crew schedule can move a town's cost by 40 per cent. The return depends on three things the engineering plan does not show: how many fibre customers are new rather than migrated from our coaxial network, how much churn we avoid, and how quickly we can retire the old plant. Each tranche of our 410,000-location programme is released only when the previous towns meet three tests: construction cost within 10 per cent of plan, net new customers equal to at least 4 per cent of locations within a year, and monthly churn below 1.5 per cent.

I treat our operating metrics with the same care as our revenue, because lenders price our debt on them and boards allocate capital by them. Every metric we report has a written definition our auditors have read. A serviceable location is an address we can connect within our standard interval and cost; a customer relationship is one household or business, whatever it buys; bulk-billed apartment units and non-paying accounts sit on separate lines. Each quarter, revenue assurance reconciles the network inventory, the billing system and county property records, and explains any difference above half a per cent. We report churn by tenure band and speed tier rather than as one average, and revenue per customer with and without equipment and late fees. These definitions showed our fixed-wireless losses in 2023 within the quarter they happened, concentrated among customers with less than two years' tenure on our slowest tiers.

Programming is our largest operating cost after people, and almost all of it belongs to a declining product. I allocate it fully to video, together with set-top box depreciation, the share of customer care that video calls consume and its billing costs, so the board sees what a video customer contributes rather than what video revenue looks like. I also bring an unusual vantage point to renewals. At Merrimont I built the per-subscriber model a station group used to set retransmission fees with forty distributors; at Ridgeburn I pay those fees, about $14 a video customer a month for local stations alone. I know where a broadcaster's network obligations sit and how a three-year renewal cycle shapes its demands, which makes our negotiations firmer and calmer. I also read every carriage agreement for minimum-penetration and tiering clauses before we change a package, because those clauses decide what a change actually saves.

Ridgeburn is financed like most sponsor-owned cable operators, with senior debt at five to six times EBITDA, so the timing of maturities matters as much as their price. I run a thirteen-week cash forecast and a five-year debt capacity model that the board and lenders see in the same form. In 2024 I led the refinancing of a $1.24 billion term loan due in October 2025. Under US accounting rules, management must assess, whenever it issues financial statements, whether conditions such as debt falling due within a year of issue raise substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue, so the 2024 statements could not have been signed comfortably with the loan outstanding. We chose a $1.25 billion private-credit unitranche with a delayed-draw tranche for fibre, accepting a higher margin and a maintenance covenant on net leverage in return for certainty and construction funding. Interest-rate swaps now fix the rate on about 65 per cent of the term loan until 2027.

I have seen public support for rural networks from three sides: the support formulas that kept Quillan Valley's exchanges open, the federal schools-and-libraries discounts that paid for Stavely circuits, and the state grant rounds that now fund part of Ridgeburn's rural expansion. I value a grant by what it obliges us to do: the match we must fund, the build deadline, the low-cost plan we must offer, the years of service we must maintain, the letter of credit we must post and the cost overruns that stay with us. In 2023 we accepted eight of eleven awarded project areas, covering 31,000 rural locations, and handed back three whose engineered cost had doubled. US accounting has no dedicated standard for grants to businesses, so we account by analogy to the international standard on government grants, deducting them from the cost of the assets they fund, and we give the disclosures about government assistance that now apply.

A cable operator's balance sheet is mostly network, franchise rights and customer relationships, and the judgements behind them decide reported results more than any revenue estimate. The ones I take to our audit committee each year are the useful lives of coaxial plant that fibre will replace, the labour and overhead we capitalise when crews install customers and build plant, and whether the video business still supports the boxes and equipment that serve it. When we decided to move video customers to an app-based service in 2023, I recommended writing off $9 million of set-top box inventory immediately and shortening the lives of boxes in customers' homes, rather than letting their cost run through depreciation for another five years. I learnt the discipline at Merrimont in 2008, when advertising fell faster than our forecasts and our broadcast licences no longer supported their carrying value. The lesson I took was simple: an impairment is a statement about evidence, and the evidence rarely waits for a better quarter.