The News: Calix announced that longtime customer ALLO Communications (ALLO) secured $650 million in sustainable financing, driven in part by its investment in the Calix broadband platform – Calix Intelligent Access EDGE, Calix Cloud, and Calix Revenue EDGE. Read the full Press Release on the Calix website.
Calix: Decisive Player in ALLO’s New Sustainable Financing
Analyst Take: Calix unveiled its integral role in supporting key customer ALLO Communications on the landing of $650 million in new sustainable financing due in good part by ALLO’s deployment of the Calix broadband platform, consisting of Calix Intelligent Access EDGE, Calix Cloud, and Calix Revenue EDGE. Notably, sustainable finance is an investment that considers the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors of an economic activity or project.
Today ALLO provides symmetrical high speed broadband services to over 1 million residential and commercial customers across 36 cities in Nebraska, as well as customers in the states of Colorado and Arizona. ALLO is a privately-funded organization with backing from SDC Capital Partners and Nelnet.
With the new sustainable financing, ALLO plans to further expand its green broadband network across Colorado, Arizona, and Nebraska. In May 2023, ALLO unveiled its Sustainability Financing Framework (Framework). Based on public guidelines—known as The Principles—set out by the International Capital Market Association (ICMA), ALLO’s Framework successfully demonstrated that its broadband expansion on the Calix platform would meet criteria around energy efficiency, renewable energy, and providing access to essential services to underserved customers. ALLO’s commitment to abundant fiber service, supporting nonprofits, and energy efficiency helped them achieve an S2SQ Sustainability Quality Score of “very good”.
ALLO is using Calix’s broadband platform to drive its green broadband deployments. Environmental and sustainability benefits include reducing broadband network power consumption by 73% through network system consolidation across the ALLO access network and providing an improved Wi-Fi experience by using 50% less power. ALLO halves its Wi-Fi energy consumption by deploying Calix GigaSpire BLAST systems on Revenue EDGE, which are designed to deliver whole-home coverage while avoiding the need for deploying extra energy-consuming hardware like mesh units or pods.
Additionally, from my view, ALLO customer support and operations teams can troubleshoot remotely, gain granular insights into network performance, and carry out proactive maintenance by using Calix Cloud capabilities, including Calix Operations Cloud and Calix Support Cloud. Through Calix Cloud, ALLO can now use comprehensive visibility into its customer experiences to streamline workflows, rapidly identify issues for resolution, and sharpen upsell opportunities.
This capability includes efficiently delivering fiber broadband services that target a highly vulnerable population to bridge the digital divide. For example, according to the FCC, approximately 17% and 21% of the population in rural and tribal lands respectively, lack coverage from fixed terrestrial 25/3 Mbps broadband, as compared to only 1% in urban areas.
Calix Raises Its Ecosystem Influence Across Sustainable Financing Initiatives
Calix needed to highlight its pivotal role in ALLO’s new sustainable financing to raise market awareness of its corporate social responsibility (CSR) unit aimed at building on an existing bank of broadband funding expertise and actively supporting customers in acquiring sustainable financing based on their green initiatives.
I anticipate that sustainable financing will continue to play a crucial role in driving the fulfillment of operator ESG goals by allocating private money into sustainability projects. For instance, from the ALLO engagement, I see Calix and its CSR office gaining greater channel influence toward advancing broadband service provider sustainability missions including, for example, within the EU’s Green Deal Investment Plan, which seeks to raise $1.14 trillion to help pay the expense of attaining net zero emissions in Europe by 2050.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
