Stephen Ward:
This is Stephen Ward and we are coming to you live from our Mobile, Alabama Causeway Project. As you can see, we’re surrounded by waterways and we’ve got I-10 running through here. There’s a lot of challenges to a build like this. There’s heavy marsh and swampland and waterway, and this is a very unique challenge, very unique build.
We have historically had lease infrastructure through here, and we felt like it would be strategic advantage for Uniti to have its own conduit, its own fiber, running through this long stretch that separates Mobile from the Eastern Shore.
We have been working on this project since probably December 2018. We had to do a lot of work with Alabama DOT, with the Army Corps of Engineers to get our permits in place to be able to do a build like this. One of the things it will do is it’ll allow for our future growth. We have a lot of infrastructure that we’re putting in the ground today.
On a normal build, this is what our conduit usually looks like. This is an inch and a quarter conduit. We’re usually putting two of these in the ground and we’ll run one fiber through here. For this project, we decided to use, this is what we call our microduct. They call this FuturePath. And you can see it’s got seven different options where we put our microfiber in here, so seven compared to one. And we said, “Hey, while we’re putting one in, let’s go for four.” So we decided to put four of these babies in the ground and that’s going to give us 28 slots literally to put our fiber in. So this is a major, major upgrade from what we have now.
These guys are out on a major rig today. We’re going to have some of our OSP guys tell you a little more about that. You’re going to like what you see.
Brandon Whigham:
We are in the process of shooting one of the largest bore shots that we’ve ever done in the state of Alabama. Behind me is a DD240T drill. It’s also one of the largest drills we’ve ever used in one of our projects. They’re out about 800 feet at this point. They will go a depth of about 150 feet. This shot, all in all, will be 4,000 feet long.
Once they get all the rods drilled out and they come up out of the ground, we’re going to hook up to an eight-inch steel casing, which they will then pull that back across the waterway. They will then install four of our seven-way microducts in that casing. After that, they will then install the fiber, of course.
We are super excited about this project and we can’t wait to see how it all turns out.
Stephen Ward:
It took a lot of a collective effort from all of our teams across every department to pull together to make this happen. This is going to give us a great strategic advantage as we move into the future. I am extremely proud of this project and what we’ve done to get to this point, and I’m very excited to give you guys a sneak peek and look behind the curtain at what we’re doing here today.
