Uniti Wholesale is Rewriting the Rules on Wave Delivery
How FastWaves™ is turning months of waiting into weeks of delivery
For anyone who has navigated the traditional process of provisioning high-capacity wavelengths, the frustration will be familiar. Weeks of planning. Months of waiting. A pipeline of demand that consistently outpaces the speed of delivery. In an industry now shaped by the surging bandwidth appetites of AI platforms, hyperscalers, and neocloud providers, that lag is no longer simply inconvenient — it’s commercially damaging.
Uniti Wholesale has a direct response to that challenge. In February 2026, the company launched FastWaves™: a programme that compresses wave delivery timelines from months to weeks, and in some cases days. It is, by the company’s own admission, a product the market has been missing.
“It’s frankly a product that we’ve missed in the marketplace,” says Greg Ortyl, EVP and president of Uniti Wholesale. “We are all in on FastWaves this year.”
Proactive, not reactive
The logic behind FastWaves™ is straightforward. Historically, most carriers have followed a reactive deployment model: wait for an order to arrive, then procure and provision the necessary optics. Uniti Wholesale has inverted that approach entirely.
Drawing on intelligence about traffic patterns and customer demand, the company has identified its highest-volume long-haul routes and pre-deployed muxponders directly into the field before orders are placed. “In the past, we’ve waited for an order to come in before we’ve gone out and acquired the optics and deployed out in the network,” Ortyl explains. “We’re doing that proactively now.”
The result is a delivery commitment that stands apart: 100G and 400G waves turned up in three weeks or fewer from the moment a customer signs an order. Phase 1 activates 40 high-demand routes, with Phase 2 bringing a further 15 routes online in Q2. “Customers need capacity where it matters, delivered faster and more predictably,” says Ortyl. “We’re compressing delivery intervals and simplifying how partners scale across the US.”
Built for today’s bandwidth environment
FastWaves™ is delivered across Uniti’s Intelligent Converged Optical Network (ICON) and targets the use cases where speed of scale is most consequential: AI platform providers, hyperscalers, international carriers, and global enterprise accounts operating in environments where demand can spike sharply and without warning.
The SLA-backed delivery commitment adds a layer of accountability that the industry has rarely seen attached to wave provisioning at this speed. FastWaves™ also features some of the most competitive wave pricing Uniti Wholesale offers, pairing rapid delivery with strong commercial terms. Ordering is handled through the iconnect customer portal’s Route Creator tool, where customers can view available routes, generate quotes, and place orders directly.
Speed as a strategic asset
The ability to make this kind of proactive capital investment reflects Uniti Wholesale’s strengthened position as a combined Windstream and Uniti entity, one with the scale to deploy infrastructure ahead of demand rather than chase it.
The infrastructure requirements of AI and cloud workloads are not merely growing; they are growing unpredictably, in surges, across routes that looked very different just two years ago. A carrier that can turn up a 400G wave in days rather than months is not offering a faster version of the same service, it is offering something categorically different: the ability for customers to move at the speed their own business demands.
FastWaves™ centres on a powerful proposition, one poised to reshape how carriers, hyperscalers, and connectivity providers move beyond the constraints of traditional wave delivery.
