Verizon could bring former Fios neighborhoods home by buying Frontier

Verizon’s next big acquisition might be Frontier. Reports from The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg suggest that Verizon is in “advanced talks” to acquire the communications provider, with a potential announcement coming as soon as this week.

Joining forces with Frontier could help Verizon expand its fiber footprint — by clawing back some of its old Fios subscribers. In 2015, Frontier bought Verizon’s wireline operations, including Fios fiber internet connections, across three states for $10.5 billion.

With AT&T going deeper into fiber and T-Mobile planning to acquire fiber provider Metronet, Verizon executives may have decided that now’s a good time to get back into the business. During the Bank of America Securities conference today, Verizon consumer group CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath answered a question on whether Verizon would partner with another company to help grow its fiber network:

We want to own the whole business, because we like the fiber business. We have our Fios build... We’ve had experience with having a joint venture partner and it’s not always easy to extricate yourself from that situation many years down the line. Our Vodafone relationship is example of that. So if the business is good, we would like to own most of it.

Despite declining to comment on the Frontier rumors during his interview, Sampath also said “To build a sustainable long term mobile plus home play, you need owners’ economics on both the home piece and the mobility piece,” and readily coughed up a stat claiming that bundling fiber and mobility services reduces customer churn by 50 percent for mobility, and by 40 percent for fiber.

Frontier filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020 but reemerged a year later with plans to expand its fiber connections. It currently offers fiber internet across most of the 25 states it serves, with plans going up to 7Gbps.