Revenue from the distributed antenna system (DAS) segment accounted for 37% of Boingo Wireless’ overall revenue in the first quarter of the year, up from a contribution of 36% in the year-ago period, CFO Peter Hovenier said during a conference call with investors.
DAS revenue totaled $22.2 million in Q1, down 7.9% compared to the first quarter of last year. Total DAS revenue was comprised of $14 million of build-out project revenue and $8.2 million of access fee revenue.
?We’ve added 1,400 new DAS nodes in the quarter, bringing our total DAS nodes live to 39,500. In addition, we’ve added one new DAS venue to our backlog for a total of 61 DAS venues in backlog. We were also awarded four new venues, which we expect to add to the backlog over the next few months as we execute these agreements with our venue partners. Our new venue sales pipeline remains strong and our backlog provides Boingo a tremendous amount of runway to build out over the next 18 months to two years,? said Boingo Wireless?s CEO Mike Finley.
?We had three venues where a carrier joined the network during the quarter. These include Portland International Airport, Louis Armstrong, New Orleans International Airport and the Cellairis Amphitheatre in Atlanta. In addition to new builds, we continue to work with our carrier partners to upgrade existing networks to 5G,? Finley said.
Finley also said that the company anticipates that 5G upgrade work to continue with all three major carriers. ?We continue to believe that the completion of the T-Mobile-Sprint merger is a net positive for Boingo, and we anticipate that T-Mobile will aggressively accelerate the pace of their network investments as we get deeper into 2020,” he added.
Boingo recorded revenues of $59.9 million for Q1, declining 9.9%, compared to $66.5 million in the same quarter in 2019. Revenue reflected growth in advertising and other revenue, which was offset by year-over-year declines in retail military/multifamily wholesale Wi-Fi and DAS revenue.
The company also posted a net loss of $4.6 million in the period compared to a net loss of $ 5.1 million in the year-ago quarter.
Revenue from the military/multi-family segment amounted to $22.7 million in Q1 2020, down 12.3% compared to the year-ago quarter.
Boingo provides a range of services including Wi-Fi and TV for service men and women living in military barracks throughout the U.S. and in South Korea and Japan. The company deployed wireless infrastructure to cover an additional 4,000 military beds in the quarter, bringing the total footprint to 359,000 military beds on 64 military bases.
