Frontier Communications is abandoning some of the FiOS TV installations it bought from Verizon after shelling out billions for the operations.
The company notified four Oregon cities, all near Portland, that it will drop out of its cable franchise agreements, The Oregonian reported. Frontier offered to migrate abandoned video customers to DirecTV.
The company might also eventually pull the plug on FiOS in Washington and Multnomah counties (Multnomah includes Portland and some suburbs), but it is not contractually able to do so at this time, according to the report.
The company plans to continue to offer broadband and VoIP, but it will charge new customers a $500 installation charge. That’s up from $79.
Frontier paid $8.6 million to buy Verizon’s FiOS deployments in the Western U.S. last year. It planned to compete by keeping rates flat but in January raised rates in Oregon by 46 percent.
The Oregonian says the company found programming to be more expensive than it had expected.