Even Wall Street Thinks Frontier Should Upgrade its Damn Network Myopic, short-term investors often shame broadband providers for actually investing in their network. But even Wall Street apparently thinks that Frontier Communications could do a better job keeping pace with bandwidth demands. The telco has been losing broadband customers at an alarming rate in recent quarters, largely courtesy of un-upgraded, frustrated DSL customers fleeing to cable. But the company also lost a notable number of customers after it repeatedly bungled the acquisition of Verizon's unwanted networks in Florida, Texas and California.

Frontier executives have blamed effectively everybody but themselves for the problems, and have insisted ongoing cost cuts (including a recent pay cut for lower-level employees) will right the ship. Jennifer Fritzsche, senior analyst for telecommunications services at Wells Fargo, doesn't think Frontier can actually right said ship without offering consumers a better broadband product. "It is hard to fix a problem just by cutting costs when your competition (cable) is only pressing its foot heavier on the capex and fiber pedal," Fritzsche said. Cable companies have been dominating telcos in subscriber additions for much of the last few years. That's thanks, in part, to the fact that a massive swath of Frontier customers still can't get the FCC's 25 Mbps broadband baseline. And the company gobbled up so much debt acquiring AT&T and Verizon's unwanted DSL and POTS customers, it's in no position to upgrade its network at scale without terrifying investors. Fritzsche went so far as to suggest that Frontier's dysfunction was actually giving other telcos a bad reputation. "Sitting in our seat, the struggle we have is that all the other RLECs seem to be being painted with the same brush and have a severe case of “Frontier-itus”, even though some are doing very good things with the network (i.e.: fiber pushout, integrating acquisitions etc.)," Fritzsche said. "Sitting in our seat, the struggle we have is that all the other RLECs seem to be being painted with the same brush and have a severe case of “Frontier-itus”, even though some are doing very good things with the network (i.e.: fiber pushout, integrating acquisitions etc.)," Fritzsche said.







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Most recommended from 61 comments



trparky

CYA! I'm gone!

Premium Member

join:2000-05-24

Cleveland, OH 44 recommendations trparky Premium Member When even stupid Wall Street tells you to upgrade... "It is hard to fix a problem just by cutting costs when your competition (cable) is only pressing its foot heavier on the capex and fiber pedal," Fritzsche said.



Will someone please check Hell? I think it just froze over man! When even stupid Wall Street tells you to upgrade your network you know you've been neglecting your network.Holy shit, there we have it folks; common sense among Wall Street. I didn't think it existed!Will someone please check Hell? I think it just froze over man!

cork1958

Cork

Premium Member

join:2000-02-26 16 recommendations cork1958 Premium Member Who would want this? Who would want these lousy speeds anyway? Here, at my house, all I can get is a whopping 6Mb download and 768Kb upload speed. What's kind of odd is that several years ago I tried Frontier and could actually get a faster download then. A whole whopping 7.1Mbps!!



My brother, who lives 10 miles away can't get any better than 1.6Mb down and 128Kb up!



Neither of those speeds, my house or brothers, are much better than dial up in today's world!

TIGERON

join:2008-03-11

Boston, MA 15 recommendations TIGERON Member About damn time It is about damn time someone with common sense instead of short sighted greed finally said something.



Hey Dan McCarthy, are you listening?

chuch

join:2001-04-11

Tampa, FL 102.7 113.7

13 recommendations chuch Member Not just abandoned copper customers Frontier also can't manage the FiOS network they acquired in Florida.



My CO had a DHCP outage of 8+ days last October that no one in tech support could explain or even fix. The answer was always "service will be restored in a couple of hours". This was in addition to constant issues with their routing taking forever to hit a page, often times timing out ever since the transfer to Frontier.



I never had this problem for the entire 10 years I had FiOS at my house until April 2016.



I finally got fed up and cancelled and went with cable.

kdwycha

join:2003-01-30

Ruskin, FL 10 recommendations kdwycha Member Simple The FCC will lower the broadband definition to 128k and Frontier suddenly can advertise blazing fast broadband and impose long contracts for 128k. brianiscool

join:2000-08-16

Tampa, FL 9 recommendations brianiscool Member FIOS to Frontier They just lost their a huge chunk of their customers in Tampa. jhoyle81

join:2017-03-29 8 recommendations jhoyle81 Member Pass it along to Centurylink too! I wish Wall Street would tell CenturyLink the same thing. The best I can get is 20/1 and that's better than a lot of other people, but still garbage compared to Comcast's offerings in my area. firedrakes

join:2009-01-29

Arcadia, FL 8 recommendations firedrakes Member sound like some other isp need to do it to... its sad when wall street tell you this.

isp10002

join:2012-10-24 ARRIS CM3200

Asus RT-AX88

7 recommendations isp10002 Member Upgrade your pathetic network At this point, Frontier is doomed if something does not change. They can either upgrade their decades old copper network based on old technology, or they can actually keep up with 21 century technology and start rapidly expanding their fiber network. Frontier will continue to see customers leave in boatloads in till they upgrade their network. I mean Jesus Christ look at their nightmare reviews on here, 130 of them good, 248 that are bad. Do they even know how dissatisfyed their customers are with their service? tmc8080

join:2004-04-24

Brooklyn, NY 5 recommendations tmc8080 Member how worthless can you make a wired network!!! When wireless is surpassing a wired network in terms of internet value, yeah! That takes customers away from wired networks! It's already happening with wireless only households. 5g networks will make this even more so that frontier's dsl network will be WORTHLESS in less than a decade and mass exodus will be all but guaranteed! So, rather than be the last investor standing on a worthless investment, holy shit, a new idea.. spend money to not make these investors holding onto the last brick in the pyramid scheme that is short term profits drying up, to milk more profits by investing minimally in a better network. Let's not kid ourselves into thinking 10 gigabit FTTP is coming to any of frontier/fairpoint any time soon.