This story has been updated with information about the markets Vexus Fiber is building in.
Regional operator Vexus Fiber is expanding its network across Louisiana, New Mexico and its home state of Texas, and it’s planning to roll out multi-gig service by the start of next year.
CEO Jim Gleason told Fierce Vexus is constructing fiber on a pace of around 12,000 new homes passed per month, spanning roughly a dozen markets in Texas, three in Lousiana and three in New Mexico. Thus far, the company has “a little over” 300,000 fiber passings and is aiming to reach “north of a million” passings over the next five years.
In Texas, Vexus is building in the markets of Wichita Falls, Laredo, Nacogdoches, Rio Grande Valley, San Angelo, Tyler and Huntsville. It's also undertaking work in Lousiana's Lake Charles, Alexandria and Slidell. And in New Mexico, Vexus is building fiber in Albuquerque and plans to start construction next year in Las Cruces and Santa Fe.
Gleason said the forthcoming multi-gig rollout is fueled by a $2.5 million network upgrade that was completed this summer. Vexus’ residential customers will be able to sign up for a 2.5-gig package, whereas businesses already have access to “a variety of speeds in excess of 1-gig…all the way up to 100-gig.”
Vexus merged with fellow regional operator MetroNet in June 2022, though they’ve kept their separate brands. Both companies are backed by private equity investors like KKR, Oak Hill Capital and Pamlico Capital.
The merger has made Vexus’ ability “to expand faster, much greater,” noted Gleason. He clarified Vexus’ builds are all privately financed and “we don’t have any public financing in our platform.”
“We’ve doubled our monthly output of new homes passed constructed and generally speaking, that merger has allowed us to speed up our output,” he said, adding he thinks private financing in general has helped speed up fiber deployments.
In Vexus’ case, “we had a number of markets that we had prospected and had current fiber deployments going, but [that merger is] allowing us to build out those identified markets on a quicker basis.”
Asked if the company’s encountered any challenges in its deployments, Gleason flagged pole permitting as one of the “biggest challenges that are out there in this space.”
Concerns about utility pole access (rather, lack thereof) have garnered attention from the federal government. Last month, Senator Shelley Moore Capito sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, urging the agency to take action on a years-long proceeding.
“That’s an area we hope governmental authorities and whatnot pay attention to,” Gleason said. “I mean, there’s a lot of private capital going into fiber deployment as well as public capital…it would unfortunate if that case cannot be maintained, simply because entities such as ours can’t get on the poles and can’t get permits.”
The federal government has allocated $42.5 billion in Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) funding to states to help bridge the digital divide. But Gleason said Vexus “[hasn’t] been successful” in pursuing public broadband funds.
“We looked at the rural areas around our towns that we’re building fiber in and we have considered and worked on in some respects, we to this point haven’t been successful in BEAD financing or RDOF financing,” he explained, while adding that “doesn’t mean we wouldn’t expand to the rural unserved areas.”
In terms of Vexus’ competitive landscape, Gleason said the competitor in its expansion markets is “generally the incumbent cable operator” and “typically” there aren’t other fiber providers, at least in the residential space.
In some cases, there are commercial fiber providers who are “strictly focused” on serving businesses and may not necessarily have a residential offering.
All told, Gleason noted the fiber expansion space “is really interesting,” as consumers now have more choices when it comes to broadband.
“Most cities have had a telephone company and a cable company for a long, long time with upgraded networks,” he said. “This is for the first time in all our cities where someone’s building a brand-new network that’s all fiber and symmetrical speeds.”