T-Mobile, TPG Eyeing Uniti Group?

The rumor mill went from zero to 60 late yesterday afternoon after a report by TMT Finance. Uniti Group might be getting an offer soon, with T-Mobile and the private equity company TPG looking to divide things up between them. T-Mobile is interested in the last mile, while TPG would be looking at the wholesale and enterprise fiber.

 Following the recombination of Windstream and Uniti last summer under the banner of Uniti Group, the company has focused on fiber network expansion while rationalizing everything. It has invested in its Kinetic brand on the retail side, while also putting resources into the wholesale and enterprise side to take advantage of tailwind of AI. We only have so many data points, but things seem to have been going well on both fronts.

T-Mobile has long been looking to add a fiber side to its mobile business, and has made some small deals for FTTx assets. Those efforts have remained small, but a bid for Uniti’s last mile would take them all the way there in one leap. The downside is it would probably come with a bunch of legacy copper, which would complicate things. But with fiber rollouts going on in so many places and the end of copper much closer than ever, one can see that copper as an on-ramp to expand fiber rollouts by a company with the resources to back them.  Or those assets could wind up in other hands as well.

Meanwhile TPG is no stranger to the infrastructure business, and the opportunity to acquire a national footprint with a lot of key routes to interesting places is something they would definitely take a hard look at.  The private equity company was a frontrunner to buy Crown Castle before Zayo outbid them last year, and they owned Astound Broadband before the sale to Stonepeak.  Last year they bought communication-infrastructure-focused Peppertree Capital Management, which would probably the the vehicle they’d use for a bid for Uniti.

So, is this believable? Yes, for sure. The main reason is that Uniti is public, and the public markets don’t respect infrastructure to the same extent that private equity does. The question is whether T-Mobile and TPG can come up with enough of a premium to satisfy Uniti’s board of directors. Uniti doesn’t *need* to do anything, so it’ll have to be a solid offer. That assumes that TMT Finance does have the skinny on real activity here, but I’ll bet there is at least a little fire under that smoke.

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Categories: Fiber Networks · FTTH · Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber