Frontier aims to take former Verizon properties to 85% broadband penetration

Making an old fashioned whistle-stop-style tour (but by RV, not train) through the ten Midwest towns this week, Frontier Communications is talking up a clear goal with the customers and employees it acquired this summer from Verizon: get more broadband to more customers.

Leading the trek is John Lass, Frontier’s Central Region president, who told Connected Planet that while the former Verizon properties it acquired delivers broadband speed Internet access to just about 60% of customers today, Frontier aims to bump that to 85% as quickly as possible. The company plans to deliver 3MB/s access to most residential customers, and has options to deliver more bandwidth in some areas, particularly to business customers, Frontier’s Lass said. Frontier has already rolled out broadband-speed Internet service to 92% of its existing customer base, he noted.

“We’re holding employee meetings and community meetings, talking to people about our broadband build-out plans,” said Lass, noting that Frontier’s ‘Great Conversations’ tour will cross three states and ten cities during the course of the week. As the largest communications provider to rural communities now in the U.S., Lass stressed that such areas “should have access to advanced technologies such as broadband. That’s what we are trying to bring.”

To drive that accelerated deployment, Frontier is working with long-time supplier Adtran on fiber-to-the-node and ADSL2+ platform deployments, said Gary Bolton, Adtran global vice president of marketing, also along on this week’s tour. The network topologies supported vary across the region, but the Adtran gear, including its Total Access 5000 platform, can support GPON and active Ethernet over fiber and ADSL 2+ over the copper network into the home, Bolton said.

Frontier closed on its acquisition of Verizon rural properties in July. It acquired networks and customers in 14 states, tripling in size to now serve more than 4 million customers in 27 states nationwide. More than 1.1 million of those customers are in the Midwest, in states including Wisconsin, Illinois and Ohio –former Verizon territories – plus Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska – long-time Frontier locations. The company’s expanded central region alone is now bigger than all of Frontier before the acquisition, Lass noted.

In addition to the broadband build-out effort, Frontier is bringing several existing services to its new customer base. For instance, as part of every new broadband installation, Frontier offers so-called “peace of mind” service, with in-home set-up on a customer’s PC as well as additional services (such as PC tune-up and hard drive back-up services ) to get the new customer’s broadband connection working properly, Lass said.

Overall, Frontier offers customers a full triple-play bundle, including voice and related features; broadband high-speed data service; and video service via two satellite partnerships (via Dish, an existing Frontier partner, or via DirectTV, Verizon’s video partner). In addition, Frontier offers TV over the Internet service that customers can access via the Web, Lass said.

“We’re three times larger now,” said Lass, noting the transition since July has “been a lot of hard work by a large group of people. We feel very good about it. We’re on track with our plans and now it’s about getting out there and establishing relationships” with new customers and employees.