Frontier Exits Bankruptcy, Claims It Will Double Fiber-To-the-Home Footprint (arstechnica.com) 30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Frontier Communications emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday, saying that it plans to double its fiber-to-the-premises footprint by extending fiber to an additional 3 million homes and businesses. "Frontier is deploying capital and pursuing an extensive fiber build-out plan that will accelerate the company's transformation from a legacy provider of copper-based services to a fiber-based provider... Under the first phase of the plan, Frontier intends to invest heavily and pass more than 3 million homes and business locations, enabling a total of over 6 million homes and businesses with Gig-plus speeds," the company said in a press release.
Expanding to 3 million additional homes will take multiple years, as Frontier said it plans to reach "approximately 495,000 additional locations in 2021." That apparently includes 100,000 new fiber locations already built in the first three months of this year. Frontier is analyzing whether it can "at least double the build rate next year," Frontier's newly hired CEO Nick Jeffery said, according to FierceTelecom. "We have 3.4 million total fiber passings today and plan to at least double this footprint over the coming years," Jeffery also said.
Frontier's current network consists of copper lines that pass 11.8 million homes and businesses and fiber lines passing 3.4 million homes and businesses, Frontier said in a presentation for investors. Even if Frontier achieves its goal of doubling its fiber network, over 8 million homes and businesses would remain stuck on Frontier's old copper network, which provides slower DSL service. Although Frontier didn't promise to extend fiber to all or even to a majority of its copper locations, its presentation said the company's network has a "substantial competitive advantage relative to competitors" because it includes "12 million copper passings to potentially convert to fiber."
Expanding to 3 million additional homes will take multiple years, as Frontier said it plans to reach "approximately 495,000 additional locations in 2021." That apparently includes 100,000 new fiber locations already built in the first three months of this year. Frontier is analyzing whether it can "at least double the build rate next year," Frontier's newly hired CEO Nick Jeffery said, according to FierceTelecom. "We have 3.4 million total fiber passings today and plan to at least double this footprint over the coming years," Jeffery also said.
Frontier's current network consists of copper lines that pass 11.8 million homes and businesses and fiber lines passing 3.4 million homes and businesses, Frontier said in a presentation for investors. Even if Frontier achieves its goal of doubling its fiber network, over 8 million homes and businesses would remain stuck on Frontier's old copper network, which provides slower DSL service. Although Frontier didn't promise to extend fiber to all or even to a majority of its copper locations, its presentation said the company's network has a "substantial competitive advantage relative to competitors" because it includes "12 million copper passings to potentially convert to fiber."
Re:Too little, too late - Starlink will crush this (Score:4, Insightful)
I really wish people would stop latching onto this pipe dream. Starlink won't replace the traditional wired ISP's, especially in urban and suburban areas. Musk himself stated "Starlink works best for low population density situations"
Will it be great for a host of people in rural and less served communities who have limited options? Absolutely
Will it be a solid nationwide competitor against all other ISP's who will obviously now have a little more push to roll out fiber and better service to more areas? Sure, i am sure it has been brought up in board meetings at every ISP.
Will it deliver fiber or even cable based latency, reliability and speeds? Nope, not in this decade.
Will it be able to handle densities of tens of thousands per square mile? No again.
Re: Too little, too late - Starlink will crush thi (Score:3)
GPON fiber on the other hand is limited to about 64 nodes per fiber homerun back to a switch. In the delivery area there is a optical switch and each CPE (ONT) is using TDM for
like crab grass (Score:1)
Shit, I prefer it when evil co's die.
All Roads Lead to Maggie Wilderotter (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
They've been advertising FIOS for *years* here in the Buffalo NY market, and yet nobody seems to be able to actually get it. Which is why the cable co *owns joo* regardless of how much their practices suck.
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Re: All Roads Lead to Maggie Wilderotter (Score:2)
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Look, I _want_ as much speed as I can get. I have Cox "gigablast" which rarely gets me up into the 700Mbps range, but I pay out the ass for their unlimited cap bullshit.
I recently decided I'd try TMobile's home ISP and frankly it's probably "good enough" if they can iron out some technical issues. I realized I can probably live on 50Mbps down and about 10mbps up, and be quite 100% fine with 100Mbps down. And I work from home over VPN, have a shitload of devices on a complicated network, and stream for all t
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this sounds dumb, but its the same dumb that has att trying to convert their wired customers to LTE/5G rather than just providing better wired service.
Yes, their quarterly numbers look great, but they too are just succeeding the market to the local cable co, which has gotten somewhat lucky and the DOCSIS standards continue to move forward too adding more QAM symbols, support for wider bands, etc. And of course they can continue to add more nodes and wider amps as they have been doing for the past decade.
So,
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Nothing like seeing commercials for Frontier "DirectTV" being dropped on the Frontera FIOS slots at the video head end within the footprint. The FRONTIER FIOS caretakers were ready to go insane before the locals got squirly.
Three regions had a very new and very fresh FIOS layout that just needed a big ass CAPX plan to extend out.
Just be reliable (Score:3)
I'd be okay if Frontier was just reliable where it already offers service. What is the point of expanding your failing infrastructure?
I'm tired of multi-day outages with no explanation. The service is fine when it works.
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And better yet, you call them to tell them that they've fucked up in some way, and they can't get a truck to you for like a week and a half. That was the final straw for my parents - they called the cable company and were set up with 4x the bandwidth, for cheaper, the next day.
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Exactly.
Where I live, I have a choice between Spectrum and Frontier. I use Spectrum but I've considered switching a few times. But the business down the road can only get high speed internet from Frontier. I've walked into their business a few times over the last few years and they have no internet and don't know when they'll be getting it back. It's been days--sometimes close to a week--before they have internet service back. And this is for a business account.
I like FTTP, but I don't want to wait a w
Promises from a broadband company (Score:1)
Nice press release (Score:3)
DOUBLE! WOW! (Score:2)
I bet both of those people are going to LOVE it.
Screw Frontier. (Score:2)
We had to switch my wife's parents to Spectrum because Frontier was so terrible in their area. They "upgraded" them to a faster service that ended up being slower. I think they wanted to claim it was FIOS, but clearly not. My wife also had a really terrible customer service experience with Frontier, and -hates- them.
We moved into a suburb of LA that has its own private company, besides Frontier or Specturm, and I decided to try them out. Good quality service, competitive in speed and price to Spectrum. Af
Honing Logistics (Score:4, Interesting)
from the ./ summary
"Frontier Communications emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday..."
As a Frontier customer I can offer some insight into that. My family owns two seasonal summer cottages in Michigan a few hundred feet apart from each other. Because it is cheaper, we only pay for internet service in the summer months when they are occupied.
So at the beginning of every summer we call Frontier to schedule a hookup appointment. The conversation goes the same way every year. We tell the Frontier appointment scheduler that the cottages are right next to each other, we own them both, they both need hookups so please schedule one appointment for both or two consecutive appointments, one for each cottage. We want to spend as little time away from sailing and swimming and reading on the beach as possible. The answer is always the same: They have absolutely no way to schedule appointments that way. So what usually happens is that the install technician (who is always awesome) drives a few hours out to our place and hooks up one cottage, then drives a few hours back to his local Frontier Depot or to another appointment. Then later that day or another the same technician or another drives a few hours out, hooks up the other cottage, and drives back. The technicians know what is going on believe that it is idiotic.
Frontier is one of at least three examples I know of, each at different institutions, where the people who actually do the work are fully aware of persistent severe business failures and know what needs to change to fix them.
Competent managers continuously and iteratively monitor performance, investigate, strategize and optimize their own business practices. For example, if you watched Amazon over the years, it is very clear that one reason they are a zillion dollar corporation is because of that relentless drive to improve.
You do not need to be a super genius or have a fancy degree to succeed in business. You need to take the legitimate concerns of the business, efficiency, quality of service, reliability and convenience very seriously and always work hard at improving. The great heroes in business have been people who are constantly driven to make stuff better. Steve Jobs was fanatical about "insanely great" products. Elon Musk is delivering products today from what seems like decades in the future. Before the idiot board at Jet Blue fired David Neeleman for having a bad week, he was conquering the airline passenger industry with unconventionally awesome customer service at fantastic prices.
On the other hand, from the customer's point of view, Frontier seems like it is managed by useless parasites.
Taking my own advice here, I will be burying an ethernet cable between the two cottages this summer and we will be paying for service to only next year.
Directional antenna @ 2.4 Ghz (Score:3)
> Taking my own advice here, I will be burying an ethernet cable between the two cottages this summer
That's certainly one option. You could also get a directional antenna for a wifi extender for a couple bucks, run the link at 2.4 Ghz, and be fine for "a couple hundred feet". Heck, I got a couple miles with a soup can antenna.
The "stick" antenna that comes with your router transmits roughly equally in all directions. A directional antenna points all the power at the other cottage, so it gives FAR superi
Re: (Score:2)
For 8 miles or more, grab some metal lathe from the masonry section of Home Depot and form it into a rough parabola.
Or get two DBS dishes off of CL, and two of these: Mikrotik LDF 2 [mikrotik.com] or Mikrotik LDF 5 ac [mikrotik.com]
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Yeah with a couple of those and OpenWrt you can go 20 miles.
The few hundred feet that OP has is easy, just simple directional antennae.
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I wouldn't bother with the ethernet cable unless you're planning on pumping multi-hundred megabit across it. And if it's "a few hundred feet" you might be over line length for copper anyway, and may end up having to do fiber to get decent signal. A point-to-point wireless bridge is probably the best solution for one connection to both structures, and they're pretty cheap these days - like under $100 for each antenna and it just plugs into ethernet.
They were created for bankruptcy (Score:1)
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You might want to read the wiki page on the company before you spread that. Around here, Frontier bought up verizon's local service..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"...Double Its Fiber-To-The-Premises Footprint" (Score:2)
Frontier became Ziply in the northwest (Score:2)