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Verizon Businesses Network The Internet

Verizon To Buy Frontier For $9.6 Billion, Says It Will Expand Fiber Network 45

Posted by BeauHD from the can-you-hear-me-now? dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Verizon today announced a deal to acquire Frontier Communications, an Internet service provider with about 3 million customers in 25 states. Verizon said the all-cash transaction is valued at $20 billion. Verizon agreed to pay $9.6 billion and is taking on over $10 billion in debt (PDF) held by Frontier. Verizon said the deal is subject to regulatory approval and a vote by Frontier shareholders and is expected to be completed in 18 months.

"Under the terms of the agreement, Verizon will acquire Frontier for $38.50 per share in cash, representing a premium of 43.7 percent to Frontier's 90-Day volume-weighted average share price (VWAP) on September 3, 2024, the last trading day prior to media reports regarding a potential acquisition of Frontier," Verizon said. Assuming regulatory and shareholder approval, Verizon will be buying back a former portion of its network that it sold to Frontier eight years ago. In 2016, Frontier bought Verizon's FiOS and DSL operations in Florida, California, and Texas. The 2016 changeover was marred by technical problems that caused weeks of outages for tens of thousands of customers. "Frontier's 2.2 million fiber subscribers across 25 states will join Verizon's approximately 7.4 million FiOS connections in 9 states and Washington, D.C.," Verizon said. "In addition to Frontier's 7.2 million fiber locations, the company is committed to its plan to build out an additional 2.8 million fiber locations by the end of 2026."
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Verizon To Buy Frontier For $9.6 Billion, Says It Will Expand Fiber Network More

Verizon To Buy Frontier For $9.6 Billion, Says It Will Expand Fiber Network

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  • I guess they like Frontier so much they're buying them twice. [slashdot.org]

    • Re:Dupe (Score:4, Insightful)

      by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Thursday September 05, 2024 @02:41PM (#64766162) Homepage

      "Nearing a deal"
      "announced a deal"

      I know the articles are following pretty close together but yesterday you can't know they were only going to take a day to get to a deal from there. And today, this is the bigger news.

      • Re:Dupe (Score:4, Funny)

        by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Thursday September 05, 2024 @02:58PM (#64766226) Homepage

        "Nearing a deal"
        "announced a deal"

        I'm holding out for the news that someone ordered coffee during the deal.

      • And say that they are nearing a deal when they have long sense gotten regulatory approval for a deal..

        our grandparents did a hell of a lot of work breaking up the Bells only for our dumbasses to let them reform and screw us over. We've gotten a hell of a lot dumber in the last 40 years.

        • our grandparents did a hell of a lot of work breaking up the Bells only for our dumbasses to let them reform and screw us over.

          They basically were broken up into regional mini-monopolies rather than in a way which actually created additional competition. I remember as a kid the phone company here was Bell South, and my parents still warned me not to make any long distance calls because that'd run up the bill.

          I don't pretend to have any ideas how to fix the situation, because deploying infrastructure is nutty expensive and rolling out redundant lines for each competitor just seems kind of wasteful, especially when you consider that

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Xenx ( 2211586 )
            Separate the infrastructure from the provider. It doesn't completely remove the reliance, but it does mitigate it. With multiple providers being able to offer service, they would be more responsive to customer needs. That means they'd be more inclined to push for infrastructure improvements.
            • Nobody is going to do that unless the government requires it or facilitates it. The infrastructure is the riskiest part of the service. It requires the bulk of the labor, costly investments in hardware, and all of the physical risks up to the wall of the building. Nobody would willingly leave the 1s and 0s to someone else, peering arrangements and data enter racks have little risk and there's plenty of money to be made by selling various kinds of customer data. Providing the actual data is the sprinkles on

  • Frontier customers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Thursday September 05, 2024 @02:44PM (#64766166)

    Be ready for the unavoidable price hike that is coming for you.

    • Be ready for the unavoidable price hike that is coming for you.

      It has been decreed that all price hikes are good for the consumer. The MBAs waved their magic wand and the regulators all agreed. TADA!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Merging of large companies almost never make things better for consumers. In fact, I challenge you to cite one case.

      It both reduces competition and creates more bureaucracy, being larger.

  • I was particularly struck by this announcement because some years ago Verizon sold off its land lines to Frontier in our area. This meant that we had to drop the land line because the service actually got worse, a result that never occurred to me as a possibility. Frontier is the worst run company I have ever had the misfortune to work with. For the most part, the people were pleasant but totally incompetent.
    • Ironically, I would put Verizon above Frontier on the list of Worst Run companies.

    • I have Frontier. I pay for their 1G service, and I do get 1Gbps upload and download (when connected via Ethernet, nothing I have gets more than about 300Mbps over WiFi).

      However, almost every day, the connection drops. Usually between 10:00pm and 2:00am. It drops for about 2-3 minutes, sometimes 5 minutes.

      Those people paying for Frontier's multi-gig speeds. I wonder how many are wasting their money, because they simply can't use the bandwidth that they pay for.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jmccue ( 834797 )
        You are getting much better that I get with Comcast (Xfinity). Right now, 20Mbs upload and download. Isn't Comcast fast /s. Of course complaining does no good, so all this says the Comcast is by far the worse. Where I am that is the only choice.

        • Before moving, Comcast was my only wired option. For me, it was reliable and I got download speeds of 100Mbps or more, which was quite acceptable. Disconnects were very rare. Upload speeds were about 20Mbps, which was OK, but not particularly good.

          • We have Comcast and FIOS duopoly here, magically having similar prices. Just finished a 2 year stint on Comcast and just wow was it a perfect system of 'just bad enough you won't call' service. Because of course, when you do call, you have to use their automated system which delays any actual assistance for upwards of 30 mins.

    • Same story for me. When I moved into my new place in 2016, we got Verizon FiOS. Six months later, Frontier took over. In the following month, we had less than ten days of working service. We ended up switching to someone else.

      I was completely unsurprised when they declared Chapter 11 in 2020.

      If they hadn't emerged from that quickly, I'd say that this was shockingly good business on Verizon's part - they sell territory to Frontier in 2016, Frontier fails to manage it correctly, (which, as I understand it, wa

  • Shell game (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Thursday September 05, 2024 @02:54PM (#64766204) Journal

    So Frontier buys 14 states worth of customers from Verizon in 2010 for $8.6B, and now Verizon is buying that (shrunken) business back for $9.6B + $10B in debt in 2024.

    These guys are business geniuses!

    • Frontier has accumulated scraps for decades, so there is more to them than the Verizon purchase. That said... Verizon is paying way too much for them... at least $1.5B more than they should.

    • So Frontier buys 14 states worth of customers from Verizon in 2010 for $8.6B, and now Verizon is buying that (shrunken) business back for $9.6B + $10B in debt in 2024.

      These guys are business geniuses!

      It was 13 states, [verizon.com] and technically Verizon spunoff a new company called "New Communications" which Frontier purchased.

      But yeah. 2010 called and it wants its Verizon back.

    • I do not think you understand what happened here. The Verizon employees that were sent to Frontier were all ready to start picking up their pensions. The sale wiped all of that debt from Verizon's books. Now that the debt is cleared, Verizon wants the actual facilities back. In other words, this was all to save a few billion in payments to retired folks. Now, there are tens of thousands of workers who are not able to retire and will have to work until they drop dead. Hurray!

      If the USA wasn't corrupt to the

  • Years ago, my parents that live in rural Illinois had Verizon landline service. Verizon wanted to get out of the rural landline business and sold it to Frontier. Frontier at the time boasted about their rural service. Now Verizon has bought Frontier.

    This doesnâ(TM)t exactly bode well for rural landlines.

    • It certainly does not. My mother lives in a rural area on the east coast, and has had Verizon since before it was Verizon.

      The state of the copper in her area is deplorable, and they haven't even talked about deploying fiber. I expect they never will. I really believe, in that area, what they want is for everyone to go to mobile phones and wireless home internet.

      But my mother insists on having a landline, including it being powered by the phone company. At least once a month her phone service goes out.

  • I'll believe it when I see it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Thursday September 05, 2024 @03:11PM (#64766270)

    Telcos promise fiber, and then offer some variant of wireless
    Our local ISP has been trying for years to install fiber, but were opposed by the telcos. They appear to have the attitude, We won't serve your area and we'll use every dirty trick in the book to prevent others from serving you
    Wireless is fine for mobile use. Fixed location connectivity should be fiber
    Wireless electronics is like pipeless plumbing (porta potties)
    You can make it work, with limitations, if it's abso9lutely necessary
    But a pipe is always better

    • It has really felt like that after the optimism of Google Fiber and the other telcos going through that two year spurt like a decade ago and then it really seemed to fall off on deployments. I suppose Docsis 3.0/3.1 pushed the fiber need out for awhile but really feels like the US should have far more residential fiber penetration in 2024.

      On the other hand Wow internet just had a crew running fiber conduits on my block this week so maybe things are getting better and we just arent noticing as much.

      • How many practical applications of >>100Mb upload speeds are there for your average residential customer? I personally might want/need gigabit, but I know I am far from the norm.

        My local telco still can't manage to get fiber to my street, despite being it overhead and less than 400m from a central office. We have cable internet, and while it is over-priced it does function reasonably well.

        • 4K streams are 20/25 MB/s I think. Even 2 of them would start encroaching on the stability of the connection. As in, you buy 100M/b but realistically you'll get 75% of that in a safe assumption. Very 'usable' but prone to issues if any hiccups happen.

          We have 300M/b from FIOS currently and it's more than plenty today.

          Given the state of media today, a fair bit will be turning back to the high seas for content which speed does wonders for.

        • To me the transition to fiber is more about infrastructure than it is about speeds. A pair of fiber coming to your house is the end point for communications services to a residence, once you have that fiber that should be the only communications line a residence needs for decades, the receiver/transmitter hardware can always be upgraded as years go on. The fiber service installing around me offer a 100mb plan.

          Not that cable has bad service, my cable internet has worked just fine for me (other than the pric

    • Wireless electronics is like pipeless plumbing (porta potties)

      Yep, the more people shitting in it, the more it starts to stink. If enough people continue to use it it eventually reaches a point where no one can use it.

      A cromulent analogy if ever there was one.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Roogna ( 9643 )

      My local telco has fiber to many places. Unfortunately not to my house, which they still after 5 years, don't know exists. For the life of me I can't get them to come out and look at the building either to realize that the building they think is here isn't any longer.

  • Expansion will not happen (Score:4, Insightful)

    by irabinovitch ( 614425 ) on Thursday September 05, 2024 @03:35PM (#64766360) Homepage
    They've been promising to expand their fiber network for years, why would we believe them this time? NYC had to sue them to get them to deliver on their FIOS promises, they settled and got an extension on the growth of fiber foot print which they've still not completed. No reason to believe it wont be the same story again.

  • Let's hope this gets blocked by anti-trust (Score:3)

    by js_sebastian ( 946118 ) on Thursday September 05, 2024 @03:46PM (#64766412)
    The level of competition in internet connectivity in the US is already well below where it should be, let's not allow further consolidation.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      Normally I'd cheer for that, but Frontier was so incompetently managed it really deserves to die as a separate entity. Even now in 2024, they're still selling VDSL as their fastest Internet option in many of their service areas. Even if you are lucky enough to be in an area serviced by fiber, good luck getting them to install it when promised. My Frontier installer was a no show for three separate appointments in a row before I gave up and went with a regional fiber provider instead.

    • I have Frontier 1G fiber. For me, Frontier *is* competition. In many areas cable companies are the only ones with proper speedy broadband. In my town Frontier topped out at 12Mb before adding fiber. With landlines being dropped they need fiber here to survive. Now with them having fiber there is actually more than one true broadband provider in my town.

      Do I think Verizon will make it better than Frontier now? Probably not. But if it keeps the fiber option alive then there are at least two viable com

  • Satellite laser link is the future.

    • I was wondering when the Starlink fanboys were going to show up to this conversation :)

      Don't get me wrong, it's an excellent service if you live in a remote area. That said, it will never compete with fiber to the home in terms of raw bandwidth or low latency. Not until they figure out how to make light go faster, anyway.

  • In 2016, Verizon sold a bunch of assets to Frontier. MAny of those assets were cooper lines, but included the "critical right of way" rights so you could rip the cooper and lay fibre, and also included all those oh-so-tasty customers.

    Before that, frontier had many assets (and rights of way, and customers) in places where Verizon did nor have any footprint, and aftewr that, Frontier purcharsed many more assets in many more areas.

    Fast foward 3 years to 2019, and along comes 5G, and guess what? 5G needs a Fibre-rich diet to work properly, doubly so if you have mm-wave spectrum (like Verizon).

    Fast forward 5 more years, Frontier is cheap, Verizon needs "moar" fibre...

    Hence this deal.

    Do you think this is done to bolster Verizon's wired ISP bussines? Think again, that is only a nice side effect of the real deal, which is getting more fibre for Verizon's Cell-Towers.

    https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]

  • I see Frontier is already installing fiber for Verison in my area.

  • When I finally moved from a Comcast area to a Fios area, it was the best thing ever. I've paid a flat 39.99 per month for the last 4 years, with never a change in price, hidden fees, not even taxes on top, and I've never had an outage or a hiccup. Comcast made me want to scratch my eyes out, and Fios makes me forget I even have an ISP. It just works, and that's how it should be.

  • When you live in rural America, there is no fiber.... lol

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