- Fidium, fresh off a rebrand, wants to capitalize on wholesale fiber and data center connectivity, said soon-to-be-CEO Gaurav Juneja
- The operator tapped Ciena for coherent optics
- Juneja touted Fidium’s rural roots as a key advantage in a crowded market
Fidium, formerly known as Consolidated Communications, has spent the last few years building its rural fiber muscle. It plans to keep doing just that while looking toward data center connectivity for its next growth phase, incoming CEO Gaurav Juneja told Fierce.
Juneja, who will succeed CEO Bob Udell in 2026, said the company has used the last year and a half to build up its carrier wholesale team. Fidium’s wholesale arm spans more than 67,000 fiber miles across metro, regional and long-haul routes, with a sizable footprint in Oklahoma and Texas, where he noted “there’s a lot of decent data center growth happening.”
To prepare for that growth, Fidium recently tapped Ciena’s coherent optics to upgrade its network and enable 400G wavelength services. Juneja said Fidium is working both directly and indirectly with hyperscalers to help them expand into more rural locations.
“We’re going to be just as active in the commercial and wholesale space as we have been in the [fiber-to-the-premises] consumer space,” he said.
On the consumer broadband side, Fidium is targeting about 240,000 fiber passings for 2025, said Juneja, and hopes to increase that pace next year to “closer to [275,000]” due to asset backed security (ABS) transactions.
ABS is a type of financial investment that public and private fiber operators are leveraging to raise capital. Fidium this month closed a $1.28 billion ABS deal for its fiber assets, following a $1.34 billion transaction in May. Other operators that have used this financing method include Frontier, Metronet, Optimum (formerly Altice USA) and Ziply.
It also helps that Fidium was taken private in 2024 by Searchlight Capital and other investors, further fueling its fiber expansion.
Fidium touts its rural chops
Given how crowded the fiber market is, Juneja thinks Fidium’s rural composition is an advantage over operators that are just starting to expand to more remote locations.
“We are not in the NFL cities and we are not a greenfield operator that is looking to expand our [total addressable market] and go and compete in markets where we’re competing with three or four other providers,” he said. “We are a deeply suburban/rural provider and that’s our sweet spot.”
Now that the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program is finally moving along, operators are itching to get in on the rural action and start building. But operating expenses could be a massive hurdle for many if NTIA restricts the use of other federal subsidies.
In Fidium’s case, it’s not too worried about rural opex because its infrastructure and workforce are already in place, Juneja said. Because the company has a middle mile network via its commercial business, “it’s much easier [from a transport standpoint] to get to the last mile.”
Furthermore, “our construction offices are already there in these markets. Our field operations offices are already there,” he said. “We already have technicians in the market.”
As for BEAD, Fidium won preliminary awards in states such as Maine, New Hampshire and New York, with Juneja noting 70% of the company’s overall fiber build is happening in northern New England.
Because most of the build is concentrated in that region, he said Fidium doesn’t have the same issues other ISPs do with waiting on pole attachments, pole permits and the associated costs. It’s already undergone the process to gain access or joint ownership of the poles.
“It’s been standard operating procedure for a very long time,” Juneja added. “It’s something we’ve been following and maintaining, versus for somebody that’s coming in for the first time, it would be brand new to them.”