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Frontier Files For Bankruptcy, Says Its Broadband Service Won't Get Any Worse (arstechnica.com) 50

Posted by BeauHD from the trim-the-fat dept.
Frontier Communications filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy yesterday, but the struggling telecom said its service to customers won't be affected by the financial restructuring. Ars Technica reports: "Frontier expects to continue providing quality service to its customers without interruption and work with its business partners as usual throughout the court-supervised process. The Company has sufficient liquidity to meet its ongoing obligations," Frontier said in last night's bankruptcy announcement. Frontier filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

Frontier offers Internet service in 29 states but expects to complete a $1.4 billion sale of operations in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana to Northwest Fiber by April 30. In the 25 remaining states where it will keep offering service, Frontier has 2.6 million Internet subscribers, with 1.4 million on DSL and 1.2 million on fiber. "The bankruptcy filing marks the end of an era during which Frontier Communications racked up roughly $17.5 billion in debt as part of an aggressive expansion campaign that turned it into one of the nation's largest telecom companies," The Wall Street Journal wrote today. Frontier expanded over the years in part by buying former Verizon and AT&T wireline operations. As part of its bankruptcy, Frontier said it will "reduce our debt by more than $10 billion" in an agreement that gives bondholders more equity in the company. Frontier also obtained $460 million in new financing and said it will have "significant financial flexibility to support continued investment in its long-term growth."
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Frontier Files For Bankruptcy, Says Its Broadband Service Won't Get Any Worse More

Frontier Files For Bankruptcy, Says Its Broadband Service Won't Get Any Worse

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  • Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @05:24PM (#59952020)

    Could it get any worse than it already was?

  • Ya, but ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @05:26PM (#59952032)

    Says Its Broadband Service Won't Get Any Worse

    Can it?

    [ Asking for 3.7M customers -- I mean "friends". :-) ]

  • They just want to clean the house before they go outside, right before they sell it. But the people in the house that own part of it get to be thrown out without anything.

  • It won't get any worse because it can't (Score:4, Informative)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @05:46PM (#59952106)
    For two decades our commercial building get Internet service via Verizon DSL (actually it was Pacific Bell way back in the day). It was terrible. Verizon refused to upgrade the phone lines in the area, resulting in DSL speeds which could only hit 3 Mbps on about 25% of the phone lines (based on talking to all our tenants). The rest were limited to 1 Mbps, and frequently couldn't even reach that, averaging closer to 512-768 kbps. It got so bad I tried signing up with a wireless Internet company, put an antenna on our roof, and ran cabling to every unit to try to get our tenants better Internet service. (It worked when it was up, but frequently went down forcing our tenants to revert to crappy DSL.)

    When Frontier bought the region's service from Verizon, we were hopeful things would improve. To our amazement, things got worse. DSL lines would stop working entirely, and sometimes phone service would cease working. Frontier wouldn't lift a finger to try to fix things. When cable Internet rolled out to our area a couple years ago, every tenant switched to cable Internet, and all but two also switched to cable VoIP phone service. Frontier was that bad. If you've seen some of my posts railing against these monopolies granted by regional governments, my experience with Verizon/Frontier is the main reason why. Any competitor would've wiped the floor with them, if the government allowed competition.

    • If you've seen some of my posts railing against these monopolies granted by regional governments

      So what government seat in your area needs to be voted out because of this?

      I hear people complain a lot about the franchise agreements, but never seem to find someone that actual campaigns against it, instead I see people asking/demanding that the federal government to do something about it. Its easy to influence local elections.. damn near impossible at the federal level.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by spitzak ( 4019 )

      How did the cable get installed if "the guberment did not allow competition"?
      You are probably correct about Frontier being crap, but your desperation to blame the government is kind of tainting your post.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Once upon a time exclusive franchises were granted for X-many years because that was the only way to convince a company to install the infrastructure. That hasn't been the case for a couple of decades now, but because stringing wire is so expensive it's still the de facto situation in many areas. Our neighborhood was wired in the 1950s and we had one choice for phone/cable/internet until about eight years ago. I forget how much it cost to recable the neighborhood, but it was going to take well over a dec

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      And cable companies are happy with this. I really wished we had better competitions. Come on, cable competitors. Please do a better job in this war.

  • Now would be a great time (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @05:51PM (#59952134)
    for the local municipalities to step in, purchase them for fair market value, and make the Internet Universal.

    This Pandemic has shown that the Internet is no longer a luxury. You need it for basic elementary education.

    • If they had a modern, high-performance reliable network, something worth buying, now would be a good time for anyone to buy it.

      I'm not sure why I would assume that the local mayor will do a great job running an ISP. The one an only thing special a government can do is force you to pay for service you don't want. They can (and do) create the situation where 100,000 residents are paying for that ISP but only 10,000 using it, meaning most people pay double. I'm not sure why that's such a good thing.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luthair ( 847766 )
        Essential services like electricity and water have been shown to be run far better under governments than private industry. Frontier has already its a failure as a private concern technologically, but obviously now from a profit perspective too.
      • we pay for universal services whether we want them or not because they're a universal good. Water, Electricity, Fire Department, Healthcare (or we should anyway) and now Internet. Heck, we do it with the food supply through massive farm subsidies but nobody likes to talk about it.

        When everyone in society has these things society overall is richer. Better health outcomes result, better education outcomes too.

        Here's a much better video [youtube.com] explaining why privatizing things that are universally good is gen

        • > privatizing things that are universally good is generally a bad thing.

          Strippers are universally good, so we should force you to by me some strippers, right? Air Jordans arw good, buy me some.

          The usual distinction is between public goods and private goods. Private goods are used by one person/family at a time. You can't use the car to drive to work at the same Inuse it. You can't eat the same burger I eat. Public goods are used by everyone. Military protection, for example. Note also that unlike a

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by AHuxley ( 892839 )
            Re "or gigabit fiber."... The private sector was granted a lot of approval by a city to be that "gigabit fiber."
            The right to be a network. The right to design and build a network. The right to keep working on the network.
            That was not granted to many other brands... that was something for a new networks to get.
            What a city grants, a city can grant to another network with the same skill.
            The city needs "gigabit fiber" ... the private sector did some work until it did not.
            A city can them go back to the pr
          • without a stripper. There are also a lot of alternative to strippers right here on the Internet. Finally it's not a universal good. I for one find the whole thing kind of creepy and weird.

            Also, me or you having access to strippers doesn't necessarily provide better overall outcomes for society as a whole.

            As for eating, what's on Netflix, etc, somebody is already telling you that. Your food choices are based on what's available, and society decides that. Your Netflix choices are constrained by what s

      • ...I'm not sure why I would assume that the local mayor will do a great job running an ISP.

        That would be nothing more than us being forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. Yet again.

        Government vs. Private party. Gross Incompetence vs. Rampant Greed. I'll flip the coin. You call it.

        • Government vs. Private party. Gross Incompetence vs. Rampant Greed. I'll flip the coin. You call it.

          Weirdly, there are plenty of places in the world where Government is not incompetent. I'm sorry you live in such a terrible place.

        • ...I'm not sure why I would assume that the local mayor will do a great job running an ISP.

          That would be nothing more than us being forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. Yet again.

          Government vs. Private party. Gross Incompetence vs. Rampant Greed. I'll flip the coin. You call it.

          Government will inevitably be run incompetently when certain parties insist on making damned sure they are run like that. How else can they keep up the mantra of "incompetent government"?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cusco ( 717999 )

            Grover Norquist came out and said exactly that to the Republican Party leadership in the 1990s, "How can you convince voters that government is broken if you don't break it first?"

        • the Canadian's I know (or used to know, I've kind of dropped off the map) love their healthcare. And my local DMV is just fine now that we started funding it.

          Government works great if you put people in charge who believe in government and want it to succeed. The problems you have is that you keep electing right winger who want to destroy gov't.

          I mean, seriously, if you put people in charge of something they want to destroy no shit they're going to break it. Putting a right winger in charge of a gov'

      • Anecdotal evidence chiming in here.

        Frontier fiber to both homes I've had it installed in, has been rock-solid and wonderful. (Washington County, OR)

        • Same here. Frontier buys other companies and parts of other companies, so they neither built the network nor hired and trained the local staff. Which means that all sorts of different networks and services have had the Frontier name slapped on them.

          Lucky for me, my local fiber service is pretty good. Frontier bought it a couple years ago.

          My one complaint is that the outside equipment which converts from fiber to coax has needed to be power cycled a few times - and it can take them a while to send a tech ou

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        Re "local mayor will do a great job running an ISP".. why would the "local mayor" be working on an ISP?
        The city would not be the ISP. The city would be the network owner.
        Any ISP in the USA could apply to become an ISP on the community broadband city "network".
        A ISP is not always a city wide network that the ISP owns..
        A city could pack that community broadband with 20 private sector ISP. The city not been an ISP.
        No city data plans, no city email names, no city ISP plan... that would be for the pri

    • for the local municipalities to step in, purchase them for fair market value, and make the Internet Universal.

      The local municipalities are the ones that wont allow competitors in.

  • What is the value of all the copper Frontier has strung for all their non-fiber services like DSL and landlines...

  • You would think... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rlwinm ( 6158720 ) on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @06:21PM (#59952236)
    You would think being in the residential Internet access business would be a good business to be in right now. Everyone I know is working from home. People are putting in new service and upgrading existing service like crazy these days. Even when COVID-19 ramps down I see the work-from-home thing sticking around for a while. And that's good. Maybe 2-3 days a week. Less traffic. Less pollution. Less money spent on gasoline. And of course - increased productivity.

    I see more and more need for connectivity in the future.

    • It is a good time to be in the broadband business, but Frontier has done such a lousy job of updating their infrastructure that the cable companies in the neighborhoods they service offer Internet access that's ten times faster for around the same price point.

      If you give people the "option" of 12 Mbit DSL service from Frontier of 250 Mbit service from the cable company for $10 more a month, I'd imagine that you would know which option most people would pick.

      • It's nice to see actual competition doing it job to kick deadbeat internet providers to the curb.
      • I bought a house in a small rural neighborhood. When the development was being built before the houses went in Verizon came out an ran fiber to the curbs. Before the houses were finished frontier took over fios. When the homes were finished frontier refused to come out and run the fiber from the curbs to the houses. They also refused to sell the infrastructure that they had put in. So a separate company ended up coming in 10 years later and running a separate fiber run and are now providing awesome service
    • You'd think that, but from what I've gathered the issue Frontier has is that they over-paid for a whole lot of outdated DSL infrastructure and just the cost of the loans required to buy it have prevented them from properly maintaining and upgrading that infrastructure. In other words it's the usual growth trough piling on massive amounts of debt gone wrong and I'm sure the people responsible have long since cashed out their stock options before the debt load became unmanageable and tanked their stock price.

  • Oh goody (Score:3)

    by beep54 ( 1844432 ) <b54oramaster@NospaM.gmail.com> on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @07:49PM (#59952486)
    Won't get any worse than it was. What a relief. This whole pandemic is just showing how completely the Internet for the USA has been fucked years ago. Pleae stop voting for Republicans. They will simplty fuck things up worse. Bonus! You can watch them do it daily, nightly, even hourly if you'd like
    • Well considering there's plenty of blue states with similarly crappy situations and it didn't get much better under Obama it's pretty obvious the Democrats will never do anything substantial to fix it either. Not that there actually is a viable third option with the way the Democrats and Republicans have rigged the system to prevent one from coming into existence, but there's just so much wrong in the U.S that all those things in themselves make a very compelling argument for removing those roadblocks and c

  • Out of Americans' pockets.
    Socializing losses yet again.
    And keeping on going like nothing happened.

    Man, I wish I could do that...

    • Go ahead. Get as much credit as you can as quickly as you can. Use all of that credit. Realize that you can't push the payments. File bankruptcy. Spend the next several years gaining credit all over again. This is a viable path for you or anyone, but you might not like the ride.

  • Their High Speed Broadband was not much better than dialup. Did a speed test at my in laws and it was barely getting 70k and the latency was horrible 500+ ms. They were supposed to have 1.5mb/500k. This isn't isolated their service in the entire area is this bad. This was when it worked which was about half the time. They came into our town and talked to the economic development group and instead of addressing these concerns all they did was push their business fiber. Not going to do residential fiber at a
  • The same morons who run it now will keep running it for the foreseeable future under Chapter 11. All this does is restructure it's debts. So don't count on things not getting worse, they probably will.

    Chapter 11 Bankruptcy explained [bankruptcyinbrief.com]

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