GCI moves to close $310 million Quintillion fiber acquisition

By James Calloway

GCI will close its $310 million acquisition of Alaska subsea fiber provider Quintillion very soon, ahead of its previous schedule, Ron Duncan said on the company’s Nov. 5, 2026 earnings call. “We expect to close Quintillion very soon,” he said, adding that completion would come earlier than GCI had previously anticipated.

Once the transaction closes, GCI will provide a $160 million loan to Quintillion and reimburse up to $50 million in expenses tied to a recently completed fiber line stretching 1,200 miles. The earlier close means GCI will take on some of Quintillion’s planned spending on projects still in progress.

What changes for Alaska customers?

Duncan expects all upgrade projects to be complete by the middle of next year. He said GCI should then be able to start turning on material redundancy in its network, which he expects to support higher bandwidth and more reliable services.

For Alaska customers, the transaction adds rural open access and a path to more bandwidth and reliability, but not an immediate quantified service improvement. GCI will absorb selected project costs and provide financing once the deal closes; redundancy and better service remain forecasts tied to completion by mid-2027. Duncan provided no throughput figure to quantify those gains.

Regulatory commitments

The FCC approved the transaction in October 2026. Alaska Communications Systems told the agency it was concerned about even more of Alaska’s telecom infrastructure being consolidated under one entity. The FCC said commitments from GCI offset potential harms.

GCI told the FCC it would keep in place all Quintillion’s active agreements and pricing tables for the life of the network. It also committed to offer open-access service in rural areas. Those undertakings formed part of the FCC’s stated basis for approval.

Subscriber trends and bundle strategy

Like other cable operators, GCI is leaning on bundles to mitigate subscriber losses.

• Broadband: GCI lost 900 customers in the third quarter, ending with 154,500 broadband subscribers. A year earlier, it lost 1,400 in the comparable quarter.
• Wireless: GCI added 1,400 postpaid subscribers and lost 1,500 prepaid users in the third quarter, leaving 202,000 wireless lines. In the same period last year, it added 3,300 postpaid and lost 2,700 prepaid.
• Bundles: Forty-three percent of GCI’s broadband subscribers also had a mobile line, and 64 percent of third-quarter postpaid net additions came through a bundle.

Capital spending and cash flow

Liberty Capital, GCI’s parent, reported $267 million in revenue and $37 million in free cash flow. It expects free cash flow to increase over the next two years as spending on network upgrades declines.

Duncan said Liberty Capital would prefer to invest in new opportunities outside its core business, but would repurchase stock if cash continued to accumulate. Cable magnate John Malone is a controlling shareholder.

Liberty Capital had planned a $107 million investment in Liberty Latin America, where Malone also has an interest, but canceled the deal days after announcing it in May.

SpaceX competition and partnership

Duncan said GCI was not worried about competition from SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband service or its planned direct-to-device mobile service.

“We believe we are well positioned relative to Starlink from a bandwidth speed, network reliability, and customer service perspective,” he said.

On wireless, he said SpaceX would not become a viable competitor unless it built or bought a terrestrial network, a challenge he described as particularly daunting in Alaska. Duncan supplied no comparative Starlink speed or reliability figures, leaving the claim as an operator assessment rather than a measured result.

The commercial relationship is more mixed. GCI uses SpaceX satellite service for backup connectivity in remote areas and has an agreement to resell Starlink to businesses. SpaceX is therefore both a potential competitor and an existing GCI partner.

The next checkpoints are the near-term closing, completion of the upgrade program by mid-2027 and implementation of the rural open-access and pricing commitments cited in the FCC approval. Until then, redundancy, bandwidth gains and higher free cash flow remain company expectations rather than delivered results.