Tag Archives: Frontier

Broadband Subscribers 3Q 2025

I recently looked at the reported broadband subscriber counts from the largest publicly traded ISPs. Most of these statistics come from the quarterly reports of the ISPs. I decided to look at the change in broadband subscribers compared to last year, which I suspect tells more of a story than looking at the change only for the most recent quarter.

There are not a lot of surprises. Cable companies are losing customers, telcos have started to add net customers, and FWA cellular wireless ISPs still dominate the industry in terms of customer acquisition.By reading the industry press, one might assume that cable companies are bleeding customers. The losses for the sector are significant, at over a 2% loss of customers over a year, but not as high as you might expect.

Telcos have definitely turned the corner after having suffered losses annually over the last decade as customers bailed on DSL. These companies are still losing DSL customers, which masks the significant growth of fiber subscribers.

FWA growth continues to be astounding. The third quarter of 2025 saw the biggest quarterly gain yet of over 1 million new customers, and AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon account for most of the overall gain in broadband customers for the industry.

Outside of the FWA carriers, the biggest percentage gainers were Frontier and Shentel. The biggest percentage losers were Lumen and WOW!.

This chart will change going forward. Frontier should be merging with Verizon. Cox, which isn’t on the list because it’s privately held, should be merging with Charter. A lot of Lumen fiber customers will be moving to AT&T.

Cleaning Up After Construction

I recently read an article from the ABC TV station in Cleveland that covers local complaints about damage caused during fiber construction. It’s titled. “It’s Terrible!: Local Communities Angered about Damages Caused by Broadband Installations”. This is not a headline that any ISP building a network wants to see.

In this particular case, the construction was being done in Brunswick Hills Township by Frontier, who used MasTec as the construction vendor. The story includes a complaint from a resident who said MasTec had hit a buried electric line and that she was reduced to using candles for months. The construction also hit a gas line and recently hit another buried electric line that knocked out power for 200 for ten hours.

Anybody who has ever buried fiber is familiar with these kinds of incidents. Sometimes the problems are caused by operator error where the company doing the construction makes a mistake. However, the problem often comes from the locating vendors that misidentify existing buried utilities. Folks who bury fiber would love to never hit any utility, but it unfortunately happens with fair regularity.

More troublesome in this story is a claim that the construction contractor left a large open hole behind them. It’s worth watching the video, because there is a huge hole that looks like it was intended for a fiber vault. The hole looks to be well off what normally be considered as public right-of-way where construction is allowed to dig without an easement from a property owner.

The real issue of the story is that Frontier and its contractor left behind some big messes. This story must be concerning to the many construction contractors that get this right. Contractors generally have a person assigned to construction projects to deal with the problems that inevitably arise. This particular incident would never have been a story if the situation had been dealt with immediately to the satisfaction of homeowners.

Let’s face it. Fiber construction is messy. Boring means digging holes, which quickly become messy in wet weather. Construction in the right-of-way upsets homeowners who think of the public areas next to the street as part of their front yard.

A lot of my ISP clients like to get ahead of these issues. They put doorhangers on every home in a construction area a week or so before construction to tell them what to expect. Most ISPs insist that contractors return areas to as near to original condition as possible after the construction. Most contractors today take pictures of areas before and after they dig as proof that they did the restoration work after digging.

ISPs also often talk to town officials ahead of time to tell them what to expect, and to give them somebody to contact when they hear about problems. Nobody wants a town official on TV complaining about them like happened in this story.

An ISP that makes a mess also has to worry about resident who refuse to buy service from them. A lot of my clients look at the construction process as a sales opportunity, and they knock on doors during the process to apologize for the commotion and mess and to introduce their new fiber broadband.

Merger Mania

The industry is suddenly awash with talks of acquisitions and mergers.

In September, Verizon announced the acquisition of Frontier Communications in an all-cash deal valued at $20 billion. The deal was touted for adding Frontier’s fiber customers to Verizon’s base of FiOS customers – which would grow Verizon to approximately 10 million customers.

T-Mobile has announced two acquisitions of fiber overbuilders. The first was the acquisition of Lumos, which has been building fiber in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. Lumos currently has over 300,000 customers, but T-Mobile said it would continue to invest for the company to grow pass 3.5 million homes by the end of 2028. T-Mobile also announced the purchase of Metronet, a fiber overbuilder from the Midwest that has expanded into 17 states. Metronet currently passes 2 million homes, and T-Mobile says it will invest to grow to 6.5 million fiber passings by the end of 2030.

T-Mobile is also buying Uscellular from TDS for $4.4 billion. This purchase has drawn attention from six Senators who disapprove of the sale.

As I was writing this blog, Bell Canada, a subsidiary of giant BCE, announced it wants to buy Ziply for $3.6 billion. Ziply was formed in 2020 by buying properties in the Pacific Northwest from Frontier.

DirecTV announced recently that it will acquire all of the video assets of EchoStar, which had just merged with Dish at the beginning of this year. This means that DirecTV will take on all of the Dish video customers along with Sling TV. As part of the merger, DirectTV is also taking on all of EchoStar’s debt.

Will not directly broadband, but highly related, Qualcomm has made overtures to buy Intel. This is a particularly interesting offer since a decade ago Intel had looked at buying Qualcomm.

Fierce Network published an article in September that said that 400 fiber ISPs are ripe for acquisition. Assuming that even just fraction of those ISPs are interested, this foretells a lot more coming announcements of industry consolidation. There is an interesting quote in the article. Andrej Danis of AlixPartners said that many fiber overbuilders “will never reach critical mass.”

This is an interesting observation that highlights the difference between how the financial world and investors look at the fiber business compared to many of the ISPs who have built fiber.

Many fiber businesses clearly have the goal of growing large enough to flip to somebody larger. The investors in these businesses are largely venture capitalists who hope to sell companies at a premium multiple of what they paid to build the business. For example, the Lumos deal is reported to be valued at over $9,000 per existing broadband customer – a lot more than what the company spent to build the existing networks.

Almost anybody who owns a fiber ISP is going to be tempted to sell at those kinds of valuations. But there are still a lot of ISPs with a different motivation. Once a broadband network is mature, it turns into cash cow and spins off a lot of cash annually. I know ISPs that have expanded fiber networks strictly for the permanent cash flow that builds long-term family wealth. Such ISPs envision operating networks for many decades to come.

Competing Against FWA

At the end of the first quarter of this year, T-Mobile and Verizon together have accumulated 8.6 million customers nationwide on FWA cellular home broadband. This is amazing success for a product that was just launched in 2021. The combined FWA customers represent 7% of the entire U.S. broadband market, and if FWA was a single ISP it would be the fourth largest ISP in the country behind Comcast, Charter, and AT&T.

Nobody knows exactly where the companies are finding the new customers because they aren’t telling, and the companies losing customers are mum about it. The FWA technology isn’t everywhere, and T-Mobile claims to cover over 50 million households with the technology, and Verizon 40 million. The appeal of FWA is obvious. The companies offer broadband between 100 Mbps and 300 Mbps in in most markets with prices from $50 to $70 depending on bundling with a cellphone and agreeing to use autopay. The two carriers have also selectively been paying customers to break contracts with other ISPs.

It’s obvious in looking at the claimed coverage of FWA in the FCC broadband maps that a lot of FWA coverage is in rural areas where there aren’t a lot of broadband alternatives. The two carriers are likely snagging customers from DSL, fixed wireless ISPs, and satellite companies, as well as migrating their own rural hotspot customers to the much-improved broadband. However, FWA also covers a lot of towns, suburbs and cities. In these markets, the FWA carriers are touting low prices and faster speeds to lure customers who stayed with telephone company DSL to save money. With low prices, FWA is also clearly targeting cable companies.

It’s been interesting to watch how competitors have been dealing with FWA. In an article in FierceNetwork, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts characterized FWA by saying “Three companies are all simultaneously within a short period of time are all offering a home connectivity product by their own admission a lower speed, more easily congested network.” Comcast is reacting to FWA by advertising the differences between the products. The company has also launched its NOW line of products. This starts with broadband priced at 100 Mbps for $30 or 200 Mbps for $45.

Charter’s CFO Jessica Fischer characterized FWA technology as “lower quality but also lower cost.” She went on to say that FWA will not be able to keep up with increased household demand in future years. Fischer characterized the impact of FWA as “temporary.”

Cox Communication has been advertising against FWA since the end of 2022. In it’s first ads the company said that “FWA is just phone Internet, not home Internet” and isn’t as fast or reliable as Cox’s cable Internet service. The ads went on to warn the public not to “put a cell tower in charge of your home Internet connection.”

Frontier’s Executive Chairman of the Board was quoted at a J.P. Morgan conference as saying that FWA is having almost no impact on Frontier’s fiber business, which is believable since Frontier offers symmetrical 500 Mbps broadband for a standard rate of $64.99, with an introductory rate of $44.99. But Frontier hasn’t been saying anything about the impact of FWA on its DSL service, which is an obvious target for FWA where Frontier has not yet converted to fiber.

It’s an interesting set of reactions. Only Comcast is trying to openly compete with price. It’s likely that the others are quietly offering price deals to keep customers. However, lowering prices has a downside by lowering average revenue per customer – a key financial metric for the industry. ISPs have to decide which is worse – losing customers or lowering prices.

The primary thing that FWA has done to the industry is to shake up the price point for broadband. The big cable companies have all increased list prices annually over the last decade to goose prices to $90 and more. Charter just announced another $3 rate increase across the board. However, a shrinking number of cable customers are paying the list price for broadband.

The cable companies all warn about the ability of FWA technology to serve a lot of customers. The cable companies seem to believe (or at least want the public to believe) that many people will try FWA and not like the broadband experience. The cellular carriers have enough capacity to have gained 7% of the U.S. market in an incredibly short time, and only time will tell if the cell carriers can hang on to these customers over the long haul.

Broadband Subscribers 4Q 2023

Leichtman Research Group recently released broadband customer statistics for the end of 2023 for the largest cable and telephone companies. Leichtman compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders other than for Cox and Mediacom, which are estimated and now reported together. Leichtman says this group of companies represents 96% of all US landline broadband customers.

Broadband growth for the fourth quarter is still coming almost entirely from the growth of FWA cellular broadband provided by T-Mobile and Verizon. This is particularly true since AT&T’s smaller FWA growth is buried in its overall numbers. For the quarter, FWA fixed cellular customers grew by 929,000 thousand while telco grew by 28,000 subscribers, and cable companies collectively lost 144,000. The fourth quarter of 2023 might be remembered as the quarter when cable companies started to collectively lose customers while telcos collectively gained customers.

Annual
4Q 2023 4Q Change Change
Comcast 32,253,000 (34,000) (66,000)
Charter 30,588,000 (61,000) 155,000
AT&T 15,288,000 (8,000) (98,000)
Verizon 7,650,000 38,000 166,000
Cox & Mediacom 7,020,000 (15,000) (8,000)
T-Mobile FWA 4,776,000 541,000 2,130,000
Altice 4,517,900 (27,500) (114,100)
Verizon FWA 3,067,000 388,000 1,536,000
Frontier 2,943,000 62,000 75,000
Lumen 2,758,000 (78,000) (279,000)
Windstream 1,175,000 0 0
Cable ONE 1,059,300 1,900 (1,100)
Breezeline 663,286 (8,476) (29,184)
TDS 539,800 7,200 29,800
Consolidated 393,219 6,998 25,761
Total 114,691,505 813,122 3,522,177
Cable 76,101,486 (144,076) (63,384)
Telco 30,747,019 28,198 (80,439)
FWA 7,843,000 929,000 3,666,000

In the telco sector, Lumen continued to shrink and lost 2.8% of its broadband customers in the quarter. AT&T had a tiny loss, and all other telcos saw growth. Surprisingly, the biggest telco gainer in the fourth quarter was Frontier, which is finally seeing its fiber strategy working.

The only cable company with a tiny growth is Cable One, and every other large cable company lost broadband customers in the fourth quarter.

For the year, the big broadband companies grew by 3.5 million customers, and all of the annual growth came from FWA cellular. As expected, T-Mobile FWA passed Altice in size, and Verizon FWA surpassed Frontier in the fourth quarter. Lumen is the biggest loser, having lost 9.2% of its broadband customers in 2023.

Cable Customer Losses in 2Q 2023

Leichtman Research Group recently released the cable customer counts for the largest providers of traditional cable service in the second quarter of 2023. LRG compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders, except for Cox and Mediacom – they now combine an estimate for both companies. Leichtman says this group of companies represents 96% of all traditional U.S. cable customers.

The traditional cable providers continue to lose customers at a torrid pace, losing over 1.6 million customers in the second quarter, slightly fewer losses than the second quarter of 2022. Overall, the traditional cable providers lost over 17,700 customers every day during the quarter. The overall penetration of traditional cable TV is now around 46% of all households, down from 73% at the end of 2017.

2Q 2022 Change Change
Comcast 14,985,000 (543,000) -3.5%
Charter 14,706,000 (200,000) -1.3%
DirecTV 12,350,000 (400,000) -3.1%
Dish Network 6,901,000 (197,000) -2.8%
Cox & Mediacom 3,340,000 (100,000) -2.9%
Verizon 3,155,000 (70,000) -2.2%
Altice 2,405,900 (69,900) -2.8%
Breezeline 296,952 (3,732) -1.2%
Frontier 267,000 (21,000) -7.3%
Cable ONE 158,100 (8,900) -5.3%
   Total 58,564,952 (1,613,532) -2.7%
YouTube 5,900,000 200,000 3.5%
Hulu Live 4,300,000 (100,000) -2.3%
Sling TV 2,003,000 (97,000) -4.6%
FuboTV 1,167,000 (118,000) -9.2%
Total Cable Company 35,733,852 (916,632) -2.5%
Total Telco / Satellite 22,673,000 (688,000) -2.9%
Total vMvPD 13,370,000 (115,000) -0.9%

It doesn’t look like people are replacing traditional cable with an online alternative like YouTube and Hulu Live – which collectively lost 115,000 customers in the quarter.

Charter is still losing customers at a slower rate than other traditional cable companies. At current trends, Charter ought to have the most cable customers soon – something that could not have been imagined only three or four years ago.

The biggest news is that Comcast is one of the biggest percentage losers, and the biggest overall loser, down 543,000 cable customers in the quarter. The biggest percentage losers continue to be Frontier and Cable ONE.

Frontier Plans to Kill Copper

CEO Nick Jeffery of Frontier said at a recent investor conference that the company believes it will be out of the copper business within five years. The company is facing the same dilemma as the other big copper owners like AT&T, Lumen, Verizon, and Windstream.

The company has an interesting path ahead to get rid of copper. At the end of the first quarter of this year, Frontier still had 9.9 million copper passings compared to 5.5 million fiber passings. But that oddly doesn’t translate into a greater number of copper customers, with 1.6 million fiber customers compared to just under 1 million copper customers.

This demonstrates the extent to which Frontier has lost DSL customers over the last decade. For much of the last decade, Frontier was the biggest percentage loser of broadband customers almost every year and quarter. At the end of 2017, the company had over 3.9 million broadband customers compared to 2.6 million now. Frontier shed some customers in the asset sale in the Northwest to Ziply, but most of the customer losses are from DSL customers fleeing to some other technology.

The company announced a goal last year to reach 10 million fiber passings by the end of 2025, so it will continue to overbuild copper areas with fiber. That should cover about half of the remaining copper passings. When Jeffery talks about getting out of the copper business, he’s talking about eventually walking away from the remaining 4 – 5 million copper passings.

But that may not turn out to be as drastic as that sounds. Many of Frontier’s copper passings will be overbuilt with fiber or some other technology as a result of the BEAD and other federal and state grant programs. Frontier will likely be participating in many of these grants to reach it’s goal of 10 million total fiber passings.

The other technology that has to be putting a big dent in DSL is FWA wireless from cellular companies. The pricing is similar to DSL pricing, but the speeds are faster. The cellular companies are marketing to the same demographic that has stayed with DSL even where cable broadband is available – households for whom price is more important than broadband speed. Verizon and T-Mobile have sprung from nowhere to gain 4.1 million FWA customers nationwide over the last year or so – and a lot of those customers must be switching from DSL.

My guess is that Frontier won’t have to cut many DSL customers dead in five years. Between their own fiber expansion, the many grant programs, and FWA cellular wireless, it seems likely that most of Frontier’s remaining DSL customers will be off copper by then. But there will inevitably be some unlucky remaining customers who will get the notice that their copper will be going dead with no offered replacement. My best guess is that Frontier’s exit from copper might be relatively easier than if the company tried to kill copper today, as is being done by AT&T and Verizon. Those two telcos are taking a lot of grief when they discontinue active copper customers. But in five years it’s likely that very few people will even be interested in the remaining Frontier copper. My guess is that market forces will get the company out of the copper business without too much pain.

The Public Loves Fiber

The latest Customer Satisfaction Index is out from ACSI, which measures the public satisfaction of a wide range of U.S. industries and institutions. The survey this year continued to show that the public has a poor opinion of ISPs. As a group, ISPs had an average ACSI annual rating of 68. The only industry with a lower rating is gas stations at 65. Subscription TV had an average rating of 69, and the U.S. Post Office had a rating of 70.

But there is some interesting good news for some ISPs. Companies serving customers with fiber rated higher with the public than other ISPs, including cable companies using coaxial networks. Consider the following table that shows the 2023 ranking for fiber and non-fiber ISPs.

Fiber Non-Fiber
Altice 58
AT&T 80 72
Cable One 71
CenturyLink 78 62
Charter 64
Comcast 73 68
Cox 64
Frontier 74 61
Google Fiber 76
Mediacom 65
T-Mobile 73
Verizon 75
Windstream 70

For companies that offer both fiber and another technology, customers served by fiber liked an ISP more than non-fiber customers. CenturyLink has the biggest difference in satisfaction (78 for fiber and 62 for non-fiber). Frontier also has a dramatic difference (74 fiber and 61 non-fiber). The only cable company ranked for both technologies also has a sizeable difference, and Comcast has a ranking of 73 for its fiber network versus 68 for the coaxial network.

Customer satisfaction involves many other factors than just technology, but the differences for the companies that offer multiple technologies have to be mostly related to fiber. However, there are other factors in play. For example, it seems likely that CenturyLink and Frontier provide better customer service and faster repairs for fiber customers than for DSL customers.

Cable companies have to be noticing this giant difference as part of any consideration of how to upgrade their networks. The big cable companies are all at the beginning of the upgrades to improve upload speeds on coaxial networks, and they must be hoping that customers like them more after the upgrades. But there is a chance that the public has come to think of fiber as a superior technology and will not rank a coaxial system as highly even after speed increases. There is still a noticeable difference in latency and jitter between cable and fiber networks, and customers who see both in action believe fiber is better.

There is still a noticeable range of ISP rankings within each list. Non-fiber customers rate T-Mobile and AT&T the highest and rank Altice and Frontier DSL as the worst ISPs. It’s interesting to see Charter near the bottom of the rankings.

Fiber customers clearly rate AT&T as the best and Comcast Fiber as the lowest. Fiber technical performance should be consistent regardless of the ISP, so the difference in rankings between fiber providers has to be related to customer service and the other non-technical aspects of being an ISP.

Should We Trust the Companies that Created the Digital Divide?

For those of you who don’t know Bruce Kushnick, he’s been tracking the promises made and broken by Verizon since the 1990s and written extensively on the issue. His latest article is “NTIA: Require Every State Broadband Agency to Investigate Those Responsible for Creating the State’s Digital Divide.”

Bruce has been arguing eloquently for years that the big telcos like Verizon, AT&T, and CenturyLink caused the rural digital divide by extracting profits from the regulated telephone and broadband businesses in rural and low-income areas while neglecting maintenance and not using any of the profits to modernize the technology. According to Bruce, the only reason we need massive federal grant programs today is to make the investments that the big telcos refused to make for the last several decades.

He argues that the NTIA should require states to investigate how the digital divide was created in rural areas and center cities. He uses the two examples of New Jersey and Los Angeles to make his point. He’s been tracking the promises made by Verizon to the State of New Jersey for the last thirty years. Verizon repeatedly sought regulatory relief through deregulation along with rate increases that were supposed to fund modernizing the network in the State – upgrades that were never done. When Verizon finally upgraded to fiber, it did so only in neighborhoods with the lowest costs, avoiding rural areas and most low-income neighborhoods.

I’ve been tracking this issue during my career as well. Consider West Virginia. I remember when Verizon was looking for a buyer of the telco network there as far back as the early 1990s. When big companies are trying to sell a property, they do what valuation folks call ‘dressing up the pig”. This means cutting expenses to make the property look more profitable. The cuts are usually deep, and drop maintenance below the level needed to keep up with routine repairs and maintenance.

Verizon didn’t end up selling the West Virginia network until the sale to Frontier in 2010. By then, the networks had been neglected for more than fifteen years. Frontier made only minimal upgrades to the properties they purchased – but it’s hard for an outsider to know if this was due to an intention to continue to milk cash flow out of the acquired network like Verizon had done or due to a lack of the capital and impact of the heavy debt used to buy the property. In any case, the West Virginia network continued to degrade under Frontier’s ownership.

For years, Bruce has made the point that there has not been any financial or regulatory cost to the big telcos for their bad behavior. They’ve repeatedly broken promises made to states. They’ve routinely milked profits out of networks while ignoring customers as the properties deteriorate.

In fact, we’ve seen the opposite of penalties. For example, the big telcos were rewarded with over $10 billion of CAF-II subsidies to support dying and neglected rural DSL networks. That money was supposed to be used to increase rural data speeds to 10/1 Mbps at a time when that speed was already obsolete. We’ve seen far too many places where even that basic upgrade was not made.

Bruce’s conclusion is that it would be ludicrous to give grant funding now to the companies that caused the digital divide in the first place. That would be using public money to upgrade the networks for these companies when profits should have been used over the decades to do so. He makes a solid argument that giving money to these same companies will not solve the digital divide since there is no reason to think the big telcos won’t turn around and do it all over again.

A Last Gasp at Regulating Copper

The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission recently ordered a series of public hearings to investigate the quality of service on the CenturyLink copper networks. The hearings were prompted by a complaint filed by the Communications Workers of America (CWA). The complaint listed the failures of CenturyLink to meet state service standards due to the deterioration of the copper network. CWA also noted that CenturyLink is planning to eliminate half of the remaining technicians who work on copper.

Similar inquiries by other state regulators have been instituted in the last few years against CenturyLink and Frontier. I feel sorry for any customers left on deteriorating copper networks, but proceedings like this one feel like the last gasp of regulators trying to score points by beating up on the telcos that still operate copper networks.

Not that CenturyLink doesn’t deserve a lot of criticism. Its copper networks are in dreadful condition and are in the process of dying. The poor condition of the networks is due in large part to the decades-long lack of maintenance and repairs. We know this is the case because copper networks of a similar age are still operating much better in Europe. The big telcos like CenturyLink, Frontier, Verizon, and AT&T stopped caring about copper networks back in the 1990s, and the networks have been in a steady decline since then.

But U.S. copper networks are truly near the end of life. It’s impossible to neglect maintenance for over twenty years and somehow suddenly make the networks perform better. It’s hard to fathom the intentions of having regional hearings on the topic for any purpose other than letting people vent their frustration with CenturyLink. It’s hard to imagine anything changing as a result of these hearings that will improve service. There might be new fines levied on CenturyLink, but that’s less costly for the company than trying to make the copper work.

Some big telcos are working to convert copper networks to fiber. Frontier and Windstream are building a lot of fiber – and I assume they are overlashing the new fiber wires on the old copper. AT&T and Verizon are selectively expanding fiber in neighborhoods where the cost of construction meets some internally set cost test – but these two companies are quietly moving most copper customers onto cellular connections.

CenturyLink has been up and down on the decision to overbuild residential fiber. It currently looks like the company is only building ‘strategic’ fiber, which I interpret to mean business districts and large apartment complexes. It seems unlikely that CenturyLink will overbuild much more of its residential copper in Minnesota or elsewhere with fiber.

I would bet that if CenturyLink could wave a magic wand and be rid of copper, it would do so. It’s harder each year to maintain copper networks, and a move to eliminate half of the remaining copper technicians shows that the company is finally throwing in the towel. But giving up on copper still means walking away from a lot of revenue.

There are still plenty of customers who want to keep using the copper networks. Say what you want about the inadequacies of DSL, but in most urban markets where my firm does surveys, we still find 10% to 20% of households are still using DSL. These are households for whom the price is more important than broadband speed.

CenturyLink and the other big telcos have recaptured the cost of the copper networks many times over and decided many years ago not to reinvest profits back into new and upgraded networks. We’re now reduced to watching the last death throes of copper networks, and it’s not pretty.