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Telephone And Data Systems Inc (TDS -3.30%)
Q1Â 2019 Earnings Call
May. 03, 2019, 10:00 a.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Good morning. My name is Adam, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the TDS and U.S. Cellular First Quarter 2019 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. And after the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session.
(Operator Instructions)
Thank you, Jane McCahon, you may begin your conference.
Jane McCahon -- Senior Vice President of Corporate Relations & Corporate Secretary
Thank you, Adam. Good morning, everyone, thanks for joining us. As you noticed, we released our results and posted all of our documents to the IR section of our website yesterday after the close to give you a little more time to digest. So let us know if you found that helpful.
With me today and offering prepared comments are from U.S. Cellular, Ken Meyers, President and Chief Executive Officer; Steve Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and from TDS Telecom, Vicki Villacrez, Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer.
This call is being simultaneously webcast on the TDS and U.S. Cellular Investor Relations website. Please see those websites for slides referred to on this call, including non-GAAP reconciliations. We provide guidance for both adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization, or OIBDA and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization or EBITDA, to highlight the contributions of U.S. Cellular's wireless partnership.
As shown on Slide 2, the information set forth in the presentation and discussed during this call contains statements about expected future events and financial results, that are forward-looking and subject to risks and uncertainties. Please review the safe harbor paragraph in our press releases and the extended version in our SEC filings.
TDS and U.S. Cellular filed their SEC forms 8-K, yesterday after the close, including its press releases in addition to our SEC Form 10-Q.
On the accounting side of the house, we adopted ASC 842 for leases on January 1, 2019, using a modified retrospective method. This new accounting standard led to the balance sheet being grossed up by about $1 billion with no impact to the income statement. Also now that we have been selling equipment installment plans since 2014 and penetration is up to 74% of the postpaid base, we no longer find that ARPU and ARPA -- excuse me-- is meaningful and will no longer be providing those. We will continue to provide ARPU and ARPA.
Before turning the call over, I do want to remind everyone that the anti-collusion rules are still in effect and we are unable to respond to any questions related to FCC auctions.
And now I'll turn the call over to Ken Meyers. Ken?
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks Jane. Good morning and thanks for your interest today. Overall, I'm generally pleased with the -- how the first quarter is turned out. Service revenues and cash flow are known as adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization are actually above our targets. Subscriber activity is a bit better than last year, but still not at the levels are like to see and equipment revenues are lower than expected, consistent with industry trends and that shortfall has minimal bottom line impact. Steve will go into detail at all these in a bit. Finally, our network modernization plans are on target, albeit, we are in one of the less busy quarters from a network build standpoint.
Speaking of the network, I'm very proud of the job, our team has done to ensure the communities and customers impacted by late winter storms and flooding have had access to vital wireless services when they were most needed. Thank you team.
Now, looking back at the priorities we set for the year, strengthening and growing our customer base continues to be our top priority. We continue to strengthen our base through initiatives aimed at improving that roaming experiences, continuing to roll-out Voice over LTE and through unique value offerings like our unlimited plans with payback. As evidence of our success, we need to look no further than churn, which remains low and the recent growth in average revenue per user. In terms of growing our customer base is most even though the first quarter tends to be a seasonally slower quarter and our plans are built reflecting the reality.
In the first quarter, we did a little bit better than last year in terms of gross and net adds. But we need to drive more growth, we are targeting to grow handset subscribers for the year. So we expect connected devices to continue to show the effect of penny tablets churning off. Our prepaid product line has suffered from the loss of some suppliers of lower priced phones in GAAPs in the product set. Both of these issues, should be behind us by the end of the current quarter. And as such I expect a stronger second half for that product, which is in line with our full year expectations.
Service revenue, especially average revenue per user is one of the highlights of the quarter, reflecting both the success from a sales point of our our total planned and the success and helping customers understand the value and importance of services like device protection, especially a time of increasing device cost and complexity. Roaming also contributed to the year-over-year growth in service revenues. And now in the third year of our cost reduction efforts, the organization remains focused and continue to deliver. Just as one example, despite data usage increasing 37%, systems operation expense actually down 1%. We continue to identify and work and cost savings opportunities across the company.
The company's focus and these first 3 strategic imperatives, produced strong financial results for the quarter with a $17 million increase in service revenues and a 6% or almost $13 million increase in operating cash flow -- adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization.
Turning to the network. We continue to believe that network performance is a key driver of our customer satisfaction, and we are investing on many fronts. First, we're investing to meet the increased amount of data usage on our network. At the end of March, 67% of our postpaid customer base was total plans and 30% on unlimited plans. We expect daily usage to continue to drive capital investment for increased capacity. Second, we are on track to roll-out Voice over LTE to our New England and Mid-Atlantic markets later this year. And third, we are executing our network modernization program, which will enable our first 5G commercial launches in 2020. We believe the investments we are making now to ready our networks for 5G, will also provides benefits such as increased speed and capacity.
Our first 5G markets will be using our 600-megahertz spectrum with the expectation that we will to augment that in the future with mid and high band spectrum.
And last, to grow our business, we are expanding our footprint in emerging out into Northern Wisconsin and Sioux City later this year. As you can see our network engineers are management number of concurrent projects that are all very important to the organization. And even with spending $102 million in the first quarter many of these projects will be implemented in the second half of 2019. And so we expect our spend to ramp up throughout the year.
Now with that, let me turn the call over to Steven Campbell. Steven?
Steve Campbell -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Ken and good morning everyone. I'll begin my comments by talking about postpaid connections. As shown on Slide 5 of the presentation, total postpaid gross additions for the first quarter of 2019, were 137,000 up 6% year-over-year. Gross additions of both handsets and connected devices were higher year-over-year. The increase in gross additions was partly offset by slightly higher disconnects but drove a modest improvement in net postpaid activity on a year-over-year basis. We ended the quarter with 4.4 million postpaid connections, which represented 90% of our total retail base. Postpaid handsets are our primary focus, so let's go next to that detail.
Postpaid handset gross additions and net losses for the first quarter were 102,000 and negative 14,000 respectively. Both improving year-over-year, albeit as Ken mentioned a bit earlier, not at the level we'd like (ph) . The increase in handset gross additions resulted from more aggressive promotions offered in the first quarter of 2019, compared to the prior year. We continue to have handset customers upgrading from feature phones to smartphones, that helps to drive more service revenue given that ARPU for a smartphone is running about $22 more than for a feature phones. Including the upgrades, total smartphone connections increased by 12,000 during the first quarter of 2019.
Along with the growth in gross additions that we've achieved postpaid churn has consistently been at a low level as shown on the next chart. Handset churn depicted by the blue bars was 0.99% for the first quarter of 2019. Fairly flat both year-over-year and sequentially. Churn for connected devices was just over 3% still elevated as heavily discounted tablets sold in connection with various past promotions, continue to roll out of contract. Total postpaid churn, combining handsets and connected devices was 1.26% for the first quarter of 2019, again fairly flat both year-over-year and sequentially.
Now let's turn to the financial results.
Total operating revenues for the first quarter were $966 million, up $24 million or 3% year-over-year. Retail service revenues, the blue portion of the bars, increased by 2% year-over-year to $659 million. The increase was due largely to higher average revenue per user, which I'll cover separately in a minute. Inbound roaming revenue, which is included in the gray portion of the bars was $34 million, that reflects an increase of 22% year-over-year, driven by higher volume. Equipment sales revenues, the green portion of the bars, increased by $7 million or about 3% year-over-year. This was driven by an increase in the average revenue per device sold. The impact of the higher average selling price was partly offset by a decrease in the number of devices sold. We're finding that customers are holding on to their devices for increasingly longer periods, driving the number of total upgrade transactions lower. In fact, equipment sales revenues actually were a bit below our expectations coming into the year and as I'll discuss later impacts are thinking about full year revenues.
I want to go back for just a minute to postpaid revenue which is on Slide 9. Average revenue per user was $45.44 for the first quarter, up $1.10 or 2.5% year-over-year. One of the major factors in the increase was the continuing migration of customers to higher priced service plans, especially the unlimited plans. Other factors included a shift in the device mix to smartphones and higher device protection revenue. One factor that was a drag on ARPU in both the year-over-year and sequential comparisons was a decrease in universal support fund revenues. In December 2018, the FCC ruled that text messaging and MMS revenues are no longer assessable under the universal support fund. As a result, U.S. Cellular stopped charging customers and will no longer pay the FCC USF fees on these revenues.
This change also resulted in lower G&A expense so it was neutral to earnings. Absent this change ARPU would have increased by 3.5% year-over-year. On a per account basis average revenue grew by 1% year-over-year and excluding the USF impact I just discussed, it would have grown by 1.5% year-over-year.
So let's move next to our profitability measures. Adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization was $231 million, up 6% from a year ago. Correspondingly, the margin as a percent of total operating revenues increased by about a percentage point from 23% to 24%. And for those watching service revenue margins, the current quarter result was 31% up a percentage point from the margin of 30% a year ago. As I commented earlier, total operating revenues of $966 million increased by $24 million or 3% year-over-year. Total cash expenses were $735 million, up $11 million or 2% year-over-year with the primary driver being an increase in cost of equipment sold. Cost of equipment increased due to a higher average cost per device sold that was partly offset by a decrease in the number of devices sold. Excluding cost of equipment other cash expenses in aggregate actually declined by 1% year-over-year. Shown on the next chart is adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, and depreciation and amortization. This measure incorporates the earnings from our equity method investments along with interest and dividend income. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $281 million, up 8% from a year ago. In addition to the increase in adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization, we also had increases in equity in earnings of unconsolidated entities and an interest and dividend income year-over-year.
Next, I want to cover our guidance for the full year 2019. As I said earlier, equipment sales revenues so far this year had been a bit below our expectations coming into the year. We haven't seen the lift in gross additions that we would like and our existing customers are holding their devices for increasingly longer periods. As a result, we've reduced our expectation for equipment sales revenues for the full year, which carries through and impacts our outlook for total operating revenues. We currently expect total operating revenues to be in the range of $4 billion to $4.2 billion. The expected reduction in equipment sales revenue will have a corresponding reduction to cost of equipment sold. The impact on adjusted operating income before depreciation and on adjusted EBITDA will be negligible. And therefore, the guidance for those measures is unchanged at $725 million to $875 million and $900 million to just over $1 billion respectively. The guidance for capital expenditures also is unchanged, still a range of $625 million, $725 million.
Now, I'll turn the call over to Vicki Villacrez for the discussion of TDS Telecom. Vicki?
Vicki Villacrez -- Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer.
Okay. Thank you, Steve and good morning everyone. Overall, we are pleased with how we started the year working to achieve our strategic priorities, which are outlined on Slide 14. Both Wireline and Cable continue to grow broadband connections at 2% and 9% respectively reaching penetration levels in the low to mid 40s. We continue to be successful with the bundling of our video products and are close to completing the cloud TV platform called TDS TV plus, which will expand our ability to build on this synergy going forward. We are targeting a launch in our Bend cable market in the second quarter and we'll take a phased approach for the remaining Wireline and Cable markets.
I'll give you a complete update on our fiber programs in a moment after I summarize our overall results for the quarter, beginning on Slide 15. Adjusted EBITDA increased 2% as we grew cable revenues 8% and maintain growth in Wireline residential revenues, helping to offset declining wholesale and commercial revenues. On a combined basis, revenues were flat. Total cash expenses decreased 1% in the quarter. Wireline cash expenses decreased 2% due to cost control efforts, while Cable expenses grew 3% well below revenue growth rates. This net reduction is a direct results of the initiatives we implemented last year to make room for the scaling up of sales and marketing expenses we will have later in the year with the launches of our new out-of-territory fiber market. Capital expenditures increased slightly when compared to last year. We expect our capital spending to increase substantially and on in an accelerating basis through the year to support our fiber investments, both out-of-territory and in our existing ILEC footprint. As a results of our fiber deployment strategy over the last several years, 27% of our Wireline service addresses are now served by fiber. It is this fiber that enables our ability to provide the services our customers demand.
Now let's turn to our segments beginning with Wireline on Slide 16. Wireline residential video connections grew 8% compared to the prior year. And on average our IPTV markets continue to achieve about 30% video penetration with some markets exceeding 50%. About 80% of our IPTV customers are on triple play bundles, as customers continue to find value in taking all three services given the rural nature of our geographical footprint and the bundled pricing. As a result, churn on these bundles continues to remain very low.
Our residential customers continue to choose higher speeds of up to 1 gig in our fiber markets. On average 25% of all broadband customers are now taking 100 megabit speeds or greater and that's compared to 18% a year ago helping to drive a 2% year-over-year increase in average residential revenue per connection. We also continue to make progress on our network construction under both the A-CAM and state broadband programs. On the A-CAM front, we earmarked $30 million of CapEx to continue to extend fiber to the outermost edges of our network, in order to deliver higher broadband speeds required under this program. At the end of the first quarter, we enabled 6600 eligible service addresses with broadband speeds up to 25.3 with the goal of reaching 27,000 eligible service addresses by the end of the year. We are well under way to meeting our first stated obligations under the FCC's program which come due at the end of next year.
With respect to the state broadband grant programs, we are nearing completion on several projects that are upgrading 10,000 service addresses in our New York markets, and we continue to seek more opportunities and additional states where we have underserved broadband areas. As an example TDS Telecom was recently awarded a grants in Tennessee to expand broadband service at speeds at or above 100 megabit speeds to 2000 locations. As an update from year-end, the FCC authorized and we accepted full funding of the A-CAM program, which will add two years of support to the entire program, now extending through 2028. And an incremental $4 million of annual revenue, which we expect to begin receiving in the second quarter. As a result, we will receive base revenue support of $82 million in 2019, plus an additional $5 million of transitional amounts.
Slide 17 provides an update on our fiber deployment strategy both in and out-of-territory. We are pleased to announce that we've just launched our second out-of-territory fiber market and initial sales results are very similar to our experience in our first market. We are in various stages of construction and expect to launch four additional markets in our Southern Wisconsin cluster this year, as well as two new clusters targeting 80,000 total service addresses in mid-central Wisconsin and then other attractive areas outside Wisconsin.
Looking at Wireline financial results on Slide 18, total revenues decreased 3% to $171 million. Residential revenues increased 1% due primarily to growth from video and broadband connections as well as growth from within the broadband product mix offset by a 5% decrease in residential voice connections. Commercial revenues decreased 9% primarily driven by lower CLEC connections in wholesale revenues decreased 3% due to continued declines in access revenues. Wireline cash expenses decreased 2% due to lower employee related expenses and reduced cost of providing legacy services. And this is partially offset by higher video programing fees. Primarily as a results of the declines in commercial and wholesale revenues Wireline adjusted EBITDA decreased 3% to $63 million in the quarter.
Turning to Slide 19, we continue to be very happy with our Cable segment performance in the first quarter, despite the fact that we have a programming dispute that led to a blackout on major stations in early January. While a blackout is not our desired outcome, TDS will negotiate rigorously to ensure affordable programming for its customers. Total cable connections grew 6% to 339,000 driven by a 9% increase in total broadband connections. As a result, broadband penetration increased 300 basis points to 44% compared to the prior year.
On Slide 20, total cable revenues increased 8% to $16 million driven by growth in residential connections. Our focus on broadband growth has led to a 1% increase in average residential revenue per connection. Cash expenses increased 3% due primarily to higher programming content costs and circuit expenses. As a result, cable, adjusted EBITDA increased 22% to $20 million in the quarter. In addition, we saw a meaningful EBITDA margin increased to 400 basis points. These results in both Wireline and Cable demonstrate our commitment to video, despite trends in the industry of increasing content costs and cost cutting. I'd like to reiterate our video strategy is very important to our ability to both attract and maintain our customer base and our customers tell us so. Half of our customers surveyed in our first out-of-territory market, so they chose TDS because we had a video entertainment platform in addition to a superior broadband offering. Our video attachment rate so far and our out-of-territory fiber markets is exceeding 50%. Without a robust video product to bundle with broadband, we would experience higher churn. Our customers value the convenience of an all-in-one entertainment solution.
On Slide 21, we have provided our 2019 guidance, which is unchanged from the guidance we shared in February. As I mentioned earlier, our capital spending will increase throughout the year to support our fiber build out. And as shown on the slide, we are now providing a pie chart breaking out the various capital expenditure initiatives.
And with that, I would like to thank all of our employees for the great start to the year and look forward to updating you on the second quarter.
Now I'll turn the call back over to Jane.
Jane McCahon -- Senior Vice President of Corporate Relations & Corporate Secretary
Adam, we're ready for questions.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
Great, thank you. (Operator Instructions) And your first question comes from Simon Flannery. Simon, your line is open.
Simon Flannery -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
Thanks a lot. Good morning. Ken, some really great cost control in the business in Wireless. Can you just talk about what the initiatives are and how do we think about where you are in achieving the objectives, can you keep this sort of flat the level for the next few quarters. And then any color on the equity income, a nice 16% up year-over-year. So, any color on whether a specific one timers or is that a pretty good rate for the year? Thanks.
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Good morning, Simon, thanks for the question. Yeah, I am extraordinarily pleased with the efforts of the cost control program that something we started two years ago under Steve Campbell and they have gone through every part of the organization and they continue to do so. On the network side, things from changing some backhaul costs, all the way through to what we do with personal logistics on moving our handsets. So there hasn't been a part of the organization that hasn't been touched in by our own estimates we think that we've been able to take out about $200 million of spend over the last couple of years. As we started off this year, we have got our targets set for another large hotspots all of the areas haven't been identified, yet. And that's part of what we do is we keep refreshing the list right now. And so I'm not going to say this is where we're going to work it but we will continue to work it all year, and it's something that we are not really built into the culture of the organization. So it's not something that ended this year just goes away. In terms of --.
Simon Flannery -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
I mean, is there a way to think about what your target margin or -- what just how we think about the outlook?
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Well, target margin. Given the current level of investment in network you know, my old targets don't work anymore, right. We've got to keep improving the margins and that's been tough to do the last couple of years with all the pricing pressures. But now that we've seen pricing stabilized we've got some different pricing strategies we've used to help drive ARPU. I'm pretty optimistic about being able to keep you know, inching that up depending upon what happens with growth in any quarter. So we've got more work to do on the margin. In terms of the equity income, Steve, any color you want to add around that?
Steve Campbell -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Simon you asked about one timers. There aren't any one timers in the numbers. We've seen improvements in the reported earnings from each of our major investments, including Los Angeles, New York one and two. And those are operationally driven some of the same to the extent we understand them, the same factors that we've talked about some modest growth in service revenues some cost controls. So nothing that we would say it is unusual. We don't have a lot of visibility into the forecast going forward, but we think we'll have some year -- and from a full year basis some year-over-year growth in those investments.
Simon Flannery -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
Great, and hopefully translates into higher dividends?
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Absolutely, yeah.
Simon Flannery -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
Great. Thanks a lot.
Operator
And your next question comes from Ric Prentiss. Ric, your line is open.
Ric Prentiss -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Thanks. Good morning.
Vicki Villacrez -- Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer.
Good morning, Rick.
Ric Prentiss -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Hey, couple of questions. First on the equipment revenue side, obviously you talked about the lower gross adds and the longer life. Can you help us understand what did you see in the quarter as far as upgrade rates and the percent take on EIP can also kind of shift revenues around in the equipment area?
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. Our upgrade rate in the quarter was about 5% and EIP the percent of sell through is it's in the 90% range at this point.
Ric Prentiss -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Okay. And so that I think last year your upgrade rate was probably closer to 6. So, yeah, people are keeping them longer.
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
They absolutely are across the board. Yeah, that the time that they're holding on this a bit of a moving target from quarter-to-quarter. But in general, it's probably 10% longer than it was a year ago.
Ric Prentiss -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Great. That helps and appreciate the color on the postpaid ARPU with the SMS texting fee going away. But on the revenue on the cost side, the prepaid continues to really surprise us on the upside as well sequential and yearly growth in prepaid ARPU. Talk a little bit about the competitive dynamics in that industry and what people are using in the prepaid product these days.
Michael Irizarry -- EVP and CTO, Engineering & Information Services
It's Irizarry. So on the prepaid front, we found similar behaviours relative to as we've introduced some unlimited products in that area, we're seeing that. We're seeing a lot of focus on our teams working promotionally with incremental addition of prepaid cards or topping up right at the point of sale, therefore increasing longevity. We're seeing as we see better churn rates and really continued focus on some what I'll say is test and learns that we've been doing in our distribution channel strategy and things along those lines. So we put some focus on there. We're doing significant what we called prepaid revolution or evolution with as I mentioned the family plans and additional capabilities for our customers.
So all in all, we put a lot of focus at the end of '18 and planning for '19.
Steve Campbell -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, I'd say one of the things to be careful with Ric is that, because of the lack of low-end phones, we haven't seen as much prepaid out of some of the call it lower ARPU channels. And as we get those lower-end phones back into our distribution in the second half, we're expecting to see more activations, but those activations actually maintain down that ARPU a little bit.
Ric Prentiss -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Make sense. And trade enough ads for ARPU. Okay. And the last question I had, Ken you mentioned on the 5G initial roll out 600 megahertz and then augment with mid and high, I got to meet the old engineer in me, what's the definition these days for mid-band and high-band and then how do you see availability for the different bands coming about.
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Well, I'm not going to try to answer that. But, I've got Mike Irizarry in the room and we'll let him talk about what he thinks about when says mid-band and low band.
Michael Irizarry -- EVP and CTO, Engineering & Information Services
Yeah, good morning, Ric. So when I think about mid-band it's 3.5. So I think CBRS, the C-band spectrum that's talked a lot about and then high band would be the millimeter wave stuff. So 24, 28, 39, 37.
Ric Prentiss -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Thanks. And then what about availability. I guess, handsets is the question.
Michael Irizarry -- EVP and CTO, Engineering & Information Services
Yeah, so handsets I think for 5G at least 5GNR in the low bands toward the end of this year. And a big focus on the chipset readiness for devices.
Steve Campbell -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Now it's given our build-out plans combined with what we see in terms of the handset availability. Anything that we get this year is going to have a tiny, tiny, tiny impact we're really talking about a 2020 launch anything that we're doing and we expect to have availability of handsets in time for that launch.
Ric Prentiss -- Raymond James -- Analyst
And as far as the mid-bands of 35 CBRS C-band stuff, obviously you got to get the spectrum figured out first and that into the infrastructure and handsets. What kind of timeline do you see those chipsets in that 35, 37, 42 range coming about.
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Well, for the chipsets is I think are going to follow the availability of the spectrum. This is what we've seen historically and then that is the muddiest part of the spectrum puzzle right now. The good news is that we're hearing more FCC commissioners saying we've got to get moving on this. From our standpoint, we think that is important spectrum our strategy that we talked about last year has always had what we call a wedding cake view of spectrum where the base layer -- the coverage of low-band you have a -- you need a nice meaningful segment of mid-band and then you have the high-band on top of that. And for the U.S. to really make headway I think we need that mid-band and a lot of energy is being spent on that at the company and at the industry level to try to get that resolved in D.C.
Ric Prentiss -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Great. We'll be watching that. Thanks guys.
Jane McCahon -- Senior Vice President of Corporate Relations & Corporate Secretary
Thank you.
Operator
And your next question comes from Zack Silver. Zack, your line is open.
Zack Silver -- B. Riley FBR -- Analyst
Okay, great, thank for taking my question. The first one on the U.S. Cellular side, on roaming you got some really nice growth there and I don't think that I heard you call out any higher rate 3G traffic impacting that I know that this line is a bit lumpy, but I mean how should we think about the potential for volume offsetting lower rates going forward this year.
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Well, as we said and you repaid it in your comments, we had pretty nice growth in the first quarter, double digits, I think 22% was the number we quoted. And that's volume driven. So we've seen increased volumes from one of our principal partners that frankly we didn't anticipate coming into the year. Hard to predict, whether we'll see that continue. But at this time, we are forecasting for the full year, year-over-year growth, but more modest than what we saw in the first quarter. I would say somewhere in this single-digits.
Zack Silver -- B. Riley FBR -- Analyst
Got it. And then just to check in on now the competitive environment with T-Mobile, FirstNet, any increase in competition from those guys in the first quarter?
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Nothing that's a step function. I mean, both of them are -- both of them along with AT&T's (inaudible) business and the Verizon business and Sprint are in most of our markets. We've got our competitive marketplace that exists today and has existed, there wasn't any step function increase in the quarter though.
Zack Silver -- B. Riley FBR -- Analyst
Okay, got it. And then, for Vicki on the TDS side. For the out-of-market build, I mean, this new area that you're targeting 80,000 service addresses is a big step-up from I guess the second out-of-market build be great to get a little bit more detail on the characteristics of those markets and whether you think you can achieve what you've done so far in Sioux City and then with the pre-sales in the second market.
Vicki Villacrez -- Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer.
Okay. So let me take your question in parts Zack, so thank you for that. The Sioux City people I think is related to you mean Sun Prairie.
Zack Silver -- B. Riley FBR -- Analyst
Oh, yeah, Sun Prairie.
Vicki Villacrez -- Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer.
So, OK, so Sun Prairie was our out-of-territory first trial market and just -- we're just a little over one year into that market and I think I've shared our results there. We've been very pleased, our penetration rates from a broadband perspective has been nearing 50%, our video penetration has been about 25% and we've also been pleased with our commercial success there. So that was really our trial market to really support our out-of-territory cyber deployment strategy, which we really like a lot because we can go where we see the attractive demographics. We can go neighborhood-by-neighborhood and we can scale it to our needs and to where we see the growth opportunity. So having said that, I announce we launched our second out-of-territory market in the same Southern Wisconsin cluster and our early, it is early, but we're -- our early sale and install phases of this market are starting to mirror exactly what we saw in our trial market. And so we're very excited, we're going to file with a third launch in the same cluster in May. So we're going to have some more results to share with you as we go forward.
From a larger perspective, we are focused on and this is really a year of construction for us, two new clusters. One that's in Mid-Central Wisconsin and the other that's in growing communities outside of Wisconsin. And that does comprise about 80,000 service addresses that we've earmarked that'll take us through toward the end of the year. And we'll start to light up that network in those clusters as we go and that should happen that at the end of the year. And our business cases are, we're expecting results similar to what we're seeing so far.
Zack Silver -- B. Riley FBR -- Analyst
Got it.
Vicki Villacrez -- Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer.
So we'll update you as we go forward.
Zack Silver -- B. Riley FBR -- Analyst
Great, that's really helpful detail. Thank you.
Operator
(Operator Instructions) And your next question comes from Sergey Dluzhevskiy. Sergey, your line is open.
Sergey Dluzhevskiy -- GAMCO Investors, Inc. -- Analyst
Good morning, guys.
Vicki Villacrez -- Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer.
Good morning, Sergey.
Sergey Dluzhevskiy -- GAMCO Investors, Inc. -- Analyst
My first question is for Ken kind of a two-part question on towers. One is just a clarification. What was the tower revenues in the quarter and what was the growth rate? And a bigger question is fully understanding the towers are strategic for you guys, could you update us on what the company is doing to improve stock margin, lease-up rates for the tower portfolio, which I think is the fourth or the fifth largest in the country and how do you increase contribution from the tower portfolio going forward results sacrificing anything from the strategic or operational perspectives.
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Good morning, Sergey. Thanks for the question. I think revenue was about $16 million for the quarter and it doesn't show a lot of year-over-year growth. But the (inaudible) is the pipeline is growing nicely right now. There is a lot of interest, a lot of different deals that are being worked through. So I'm optimistic about the pipeline. We've then we've augmented our marketing resources in that area to further monetize those assets subject to not getting in the way of what we've got to do with our network modernization. Because as we start to go through this project and we're talking about everything from tower moving radios up the tower to MIMO and different things that are going to increase our utilization of the tower and increase our piece of change in that real estate we will look to drive value where we can. But the extra debt, but we get tower rent are inconsequential if they get in the way of our network quality to our core business. So a tight rope, we continue to walk with trying to maximize the value of those assets and as I said, one of the big things is, we've augmented the marketing resources in that area.
Sergey Dluzhevskiy -- GAMCO Investors, Inc. -- Analyst
Right. Another question on the wireless side, could you maybe provide more color on your Iowa and Northern Wisconsin edge out opportunity. What prompted you to pursue this after several years I guess, just focusing on your existing markets and what are the next steps in this process and do you see other edge out opportunities as you look at your footprint.
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
So the edge out is a combination of a desire to continue to leverage our distribution, our name, our systems are combined with the evolution of the technology. For years, we've had some licenses that cover a part of our footprint today but also cover these other areas. But CDMA equipment was not built for those -- that spectrum. So as a result, we couldn't go in with a voice product, given that CDMA was our core service. As we have moved to voice over LTE though, we can which we have put across Iowa and Wisconsin now, we can use this spectrum and offer both a voice and data product in those markets. And so the -- what we're doing today is we're building out those areas. We expect to have some meaningful coverage by the end of the year. At the same time, we're starting to work on distribution, so that we can competitively enter those markets late this year right around that and we turn the quarter into next year. Similarly, there are a few other areas with today's licenses that we will look at once we get these launched and get the result in from these markets.
Sergey Dluzhevskiy -- GAMCO Investors, Inc. -- Analyst
Great. My next question is, I think for both businesses, is FCC recently announced that the agency is contemplating, creating a rural digital opportunity fund focused on building out high-speed broadband in rural America. So if you could share your initial thoughts on this proposal and whether you see incremental revenue opportunities from this fund going beyond A-CAM support on the Wireline side. And also on the wireless side, could this be an opportunity for U.S. Cellular in some markets?
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
So what I'll say from the wireless side is it absolutely could be an opportunity. But it can't go pass (inaudible) because there aren't sufficient details out on this program yet to really going further. I mean, where we see we like the idea that they're putting money toward it. We're going to be involved actively involved in trying to help formulate rules that allow us to participate. But at this time, this isn't up on the table for us to put any real light on it.
Jane McCahon -- Senior Vice President of Corporate Relations & Corporate Secretary
And Sergey, I'm sitting right where Ken is as well. This could open up opportunities for rate of return carriers you know, certainly looking to let edge out into adjacent underserved areas where this money could be available. But again, we're waiting to see the details, but clearly onetime infusions are adequate. A long-term program is going to be needed to really close the digital divide in rural areas.
Sergey Dluzhevskiy -- GAMCO Investors, Inc. -- Analyst
Thank you. And my last question for Vicki is on the edge out on the out of footprint build. So you've already touched a little bit on the Sun Prairie market. But my question I think is slightly different. So maybe if you could share what you guys have learned from Sun Prairie market and what are the best practices as you've had this service and this market launched for over years that you could use and build on as you go into adjacent markets and potentially other markets in different states.
Vicki Villacrez -- Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer.
Well, we have Sergey, we've learned a lot just from our fiber deployment strategy within our existing ILEC wireline footprint. As you know, we've got over up to 30 markets now that where we've deployed fiber right within our own ILEC markets. And through that repeatable process we have learned a lot around our construction, our planning, our looking at neighborhoods, the attractiveness, pent-up demand in certain neighborhoods, the density factors, the topography factors, aerial versus buried all sorts of complexities that go into our analysis and they're different market by market. Having said that, all of those learnings have been carried forward and certainly within our trial market in Sun Prairie we right off the bat learn that there was a greater pent-up demand for alternative choices to those that these customers had in those markets where they had an incumbent telco that hasn't been keeping up with upgrading their network and they didn't have a lot of choices. And so our take rates. After that, we are exceeding our expectations and we roll those learnings forward, certainly on the construction side, you have different challenges as you go forward and those earnings get rolled into our analysis as well.
Sergey Dluzhevskiy -- GAMCO Investors, Inc. -- Analyst
Thank you.
Operator
And your final question comes from Michael Rollins. Michael, your lines are open.
Michael Rollins -- Citi -- Analyst
Hi, thanks for taking the questions. If I could follow-up, you mentioned the LTE VoLTE briefly. And was wondering if you could talk a bit about, first where is (Technical Difficulty) VoLTE and when do you think the company would be in a position to not need CDMA chips in the phones where you could just have customers fully on LTE and VoLTE. And then secondly just on the other side of VoLTE the roaming side, you talked a little bit about the roaming performance this year. But where is VoLTE and all of that and is there an incremental dollar opportunity from that product arena. Thanks.
Steve Campbell -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Hey Mike, we're going to have to go back. We lost about 10 seconds of your question from when you started to introduce it. The next thing we heard was CDMA chipset. So was there in between that we lost.
Michael Rollins -- Citi -- Analyst
Oh, so that I was asking as you think about the migration of your customers to VoLTE, when you could potentially be in a position with your network and the VoLTE usage, where you wouldn't need to put CDMA chips anymore in your phones, you can just sell an LTE VoLTE phone stand-alone?
Michael Irizarry -- EVP and CTO, Engineering & Information Services
Yeah, hey Mike, this is Mike Irizarry. Good morning. Yeah, so as we said before, the VoLTE program is multi-year. So, right now, we're targeting to have our entire footprint completed by the end of 2020, early 2021. You still have to migrate customers over and we expect that to have a tail for us but in terms network completion end of 2020, first part of 2021.
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
So if you think about it from a handset perspective end of '21 all the handsets in all the markets would no longer need a CDMA chipset. And it's possible that earlier than that date in certain clusters will only be putting VoLTE in there. But from a network standpoint just because we stopped, we get VoLTE everywhere, does it mean that we're necessarily going to be turning off the CDMA, it's going to be a matter of how much traffic is still being utilized on the small amount of spectrum that we have dedicated to it. And that will be a then type of decision.
Michael Rollins -- Citi -- Analyst
And on roaming side?
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
On the roaming side, so yes, we've always looked at VoLTE as an opportunity to serve more than just the historic CDMA carriers. I'll let Steve talk a little bit more about where we are and with it.
Steve Campbell -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, and so we currently have the commercial agreements in place with all of the four national carriers. We have some inbound, a little bit of outbound traffic on VoLTE. But it's very minor at this point, we're in various stages of testing and implementation with the others. So there is definitely some potential upside revenue to come right now it's very negligible in terms of the overall income and expense. But I think the important thing is having gotten those commercial agreements in place and having started the work with the other carriers toward implementation.
Michael Rollins -- Citi -- Analyst
Thank you.
Operator
And we have no further questions at this time. So I'll turn the call back over to the presenters.
Jane McCahon -- Senior Vice President of Corporate Relations & Corporate Secretary
We'd like to thank you again for joining us and please let us know if you have any follow-up questions. Have a great weekend.
Operator
And this does conclude today's conference call. You may now disconnect.
Duration: 57 minutes
Call participants:
Jane McCahon -- Senior Vice President of Corporate Relations & Corporate Secretary
Ken Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Steve Campbell -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Vicki Villacrez -- Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer.
Simon Flannery -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
Ric Prentiss -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Michael Irizarry -- EVP and CTO, Engineering & Information Services
Zack Silver -- B. Riley FBR -- Analyst
Sergey Dluzhevskiy -- GAMCO Investors, Inc. -- Analyst
Michael Rollins -- Citi -- Analyst
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