Frontier Exits Bankruptcy, Claims It Will Double Fiber-To-the-Home Footprint - Slashdot

Frontier Exits Bankruptcy, Claims It Will Double Fiber-To-the-Home Footprint - Slashdot
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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."
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Frontier Exits Bankruptcy, Claims It Will Double Fiber-To-the-Home Footprint
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Frontier Exits Bankruptcy, Claims It Will Double Fiber-To-the-Home Footprint
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The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Re:Too little, too late - Starlink will crush this
Score:
, Insightful)
by
Anonymous Coward
writes:
on Tuesday May 04, 2021 @04:22PM (
#61347828
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.
Parent
Share
Re: Too little, too late - Starlink will crush thi
Score:
by
e3m4n
( 947977 )
writes:
Yea people forget that radio comms are a shared resource. Just running point-2-point and point-2-multipoint from a bunch of towers in a city involves being aware of what traffic you intersect with that can behave like cross-talk in a lamen explanation. Even using GPS sync you have certain time division segments you are limited to.
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:
by
Tablizer
( 95088 )
writes:
Shit, I prefer it when evil co's die.
All Roads Lead to Maggie Wilderotter
Score:
, Interesting)
by
mlw4428
( 1029576 )
writes:
on Tuesday May 04, 2021 @04:14PM (
#61347798
I was hired by Verizon just before the Frontier Communications buyout was announced. Within months Maggie was sending out company-wide emails extolling the value of DSL and how it could "compete" with cable. FiOS wasn't the way forward according to her, it was expensive and apparently she didn't think speed was necessary. DSL was "the path forward", except it was priced against cable which could offer 3-4 times the speed (at least) and that was in the BEST of circumstances. All too often a home's copper infrastructure was so poor that signal degraded, COs used antiquated equipment, and what few homes could get advertised speeds rarely saw much above 3.0Mbps. I was a business sales associate and I couldn't sell DSL. Maggie wanted us to say literally whatever it took to sell the shitty products...but when you're not investing in the future, you're getting left in the past. I left that shithole and while I used their FIBER service, I never forgot how stupid Maggie Wilderotter was.
Share
Re:
Score:
by
inode_buddha
( 576844 )
writes:
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.
Re:
Score:
by
PetiePooo
( 606423 )
writes:
Where are my mod points when I need them!!
Re: All Roads Lead to Maggie Wilderotter
Score:
by
e3m4n
( 947977 )
writes:
Dont forget distance limiting. I did a continuity test on an SHDSL concentrator from my wire wrap panel all the way to the wire wrap panel before it tied into a 300 pair trunk, was 1200ft. There was 1200ft of copper in the building BEFORE it even made it to the street. Its not distance as a crow flies, but as a mouse travels. I turned up ADSL2+ to a customer right across the street, not even 200ft away and struggled to get 24x1. I was looking at having to eat another port on the dslam just to G.Bond on a se
Re:
Score:
by
RightSaidFred99
( 874576 )
writes:
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
Re:
Score:
by
bored
( 40072 )
writes:
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,
Re:
Score:
by
nevermindme
( 912672 )
writes:
Ahh... Maggie... poor child.
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:
by
awwshit
( 6214476 )
writes:
on Tuesday May 04, 2021 @04:37PM (
#61347864
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.
Share
Re:
Score:
by
MachineShedFred
( 621896 )
writes:
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.
Re:
Score:
by
R3d M3rcury
( 871886 )
writes:
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:
by
akw0088
( 7073305 )
writes:
I've heard time and time again about companies planning to expand their fiber network, but never that they have done so successfully
Nice press release
Score:
by
Krishnoid
( 984597 )
writes:
on Tuesday May 04, 2021 @04:56PM (
#61347914
Journal
Frontier intends to invest heavily -- in stock buybacks
and pass more than 3 million homes and business locations -- while driving, in their contractors' trucks
enabling a total of over 6 million homes and businesses -- already wired or functional anyway
with Gig-plus speeds -- with 'Gig' meaning "within two orders of magnitude of 1E9 bits/second to our cached servers", and 'plus' meaning "whatever"
Share
DOUBLE! WOW!
Score:
by
clambake
( 37702 )
writes:
I bet both of those people are going to LOVE it.
Screw Frontier.
Score:
by
kellin
( 28417 )
writes:
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:
, Interesting)
by
Jodka
( 520060 )
writes:
on Tuesday May 04, 2021 @05:26PM (
#61347984
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.
Share
Directional antenna @ 2.4 Ghz
Score:
by
raymorris
( 2726007 )
writes:
> 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:
by
c-A-d
( 77980 )
writes:
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]
Re:
Score:
by
raymorris
( 2726007 )
writes:
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.
Re:
Score:
by
MachineShedFred
( 621896 )
writes:
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:
by
androk1
( 8059434 )
writes:
They were created for bankruptcy. ATT wanted to get rid of a bunch of debt, and telephone obligations, so they created Frontier so the mothership could be more profitable
Re:
Score:
by
kellin
( 28417 )
writes:
You might want to read the wiki page on the company before you spread that. Around here, Frontier bought up verizon's local service..
[wikipedia.org]
"...Double Its Fiber-To-The-Premises Footprint"
Score:
by
ewhac
( 5844 )
writes:
Two times zero is still zero.
Frontier became Ziply in the northwest
Score:
by
imidan
( 559239 )
writes:
Where I live, Frontier has just been crummy DSL service for years. Frontier sold off their Internet service to Ziply. Ziply is now aggressively rolling out fiber, offering gigabit service at a price comparable to (slightly less than) my 250Mb/s cable Internet. I'm tempted to try it, because there doesn't really seem to be a catch... if it doesn't work out, I can always go back to cable. The one thing I don't yet understand is what kind of modem I need to buy. I don't like renting them, and I don't like all-
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