John Hixon:
John Hixon here with Uniti Fleet. I’m out here with some of my comrades and Marcus Hall today.
Marcus Hall:
We’ve got our three brand new splicing rigs, the Sprinter vans. They are going to be deployed to the bigger cities where the [inaudible 00:00:20]’s a little tight and we don’t have the opportunity to pull a truck and a trailer into a location. These are very special vans.
John Hixon:
We started this process of about a year ago getting these vans approved, and once they were approved, Marcus and I went to work, pen and paper. We seeked out an upfitter in Denver, Colorado, which we later visited when the vans reached 85% completion just to make sure that we were on the same page, and they are cutting edge and phenomenal. They are equipped with USB and LED, marker board countertops, and all of the modern equipment that you could expect to see in a rolling office.
Uniti is really stepped up to give us some really high-tech equipment. These are built for our worst day, not our every day, and we’ve got the necessary tools on here to go into one of the worst events we could see. They are a 2500 series diesel unit, and they are equipped to pull an additional splice trailer set up when we can partner up splicers and go into some harsh environments with these units.
These vans are going to be fantastic pieces of equipment for us where we can’t necessarily navigate a large truck and trailer. They are the ambulances of our network, and they are the armored truck to protect our employees. We can lock these things down differently than we can a truck and a trailer.
Marcus Hall:
These vans are rigged and ready to go for the best of the best of our splicers. They’re going to Orlando, Tampa, and New Orleans. Some of our bigger cities where things are a little tight.
John Hixon:
Uniti Fiber wanted to offer our frontline splicers this tool that gets them out there on the front lines, helps them expand our network, ultimately making a direct impact on our bottom line.
Thank you guys for checking us out today. We’re really excited to unveil these for you, and geographically speaking, these vans are all going to leave and go to separate parts of the Uniti Network. And we’re excited to show them all to you while they’re here in one place, but Marcus is about to put these splicers to work and send these things out.
Marcus Hall:
All right, guys. Let’s go to work.
