Can Windstream sell its fiber lease(s) to another party? In other words, company A pays Windstream a certain amount of money to replace it on the Uniti lease? Company A would take over the use of the fiber and make all the payments to Uniti that Windstream would have made.
Does the lease arrangement allow this sort of thing?
How about the current lease costs? Is Windstream paying the going rate to lease this fiber or is it paying either over or under market rates?
The more important question is why would any telco want to lease and operate these assets? The future is not in low-bandwidth wireline copper assets. The fiber is more aptly suited for a wireless company who craves it for 5G, but how do they separate it from the other fiber assets?
Well it's public knowledge what Windstream pays Uniti it's around 650m a year for its own OSP both copper and fiber you can go-to this website
https://uniti.com/network?map=fiber
And click on "exclusive lease" to see Windstream leased circuits. The. You can go here to see what Windstream has that's IRU or leased from another company etc.etc. then you can make the judgment if it's fair market or not...
https://www.windstreamenterprise.com/wholesale/interactive-map/
No free lunch and nothing comes cheap thanks for playing.