Fiber acquisition news has been flooding the headlines as operators look to prepare for 5G, but at least one company isn’t looking to join the fray. At least not yet.
Speaking during an earnings call earlier this week, Frontier CEO Dan McCarthy said his company is currently content with its fiber holdings and has a lot of room to run with existing assets to slash churn and turn up subscriber additions.
“I think we’re very happy with the assets we have right now,” McCarthy reports. “Obviously we think we can do a lot more with the assets as we get the machine really tuned up both on the churn side and on the gross add side. So we feel good about the fact that we have 4.5 million households that we can serve with fiber and all the fiber that is in the network that enables a lot of the commercial opportunities that Ken and the team are going after. So we feel really good about that.”
“We’re not really looking to do anything at this point,” he concludes.
McCarthy’s comments come in the context of Verizon’s announcement that it plans to acquire WideOpenWest’s fiber assets in the Chicago market. Verizon says the move will help it cut leasing costs and set the stage for further macro site and small cell deployments in the area.
Frontier boasts some 180,000 route fiber miles that offer fiber-to-the-home to 4.5 million customers and 10 million fiber-fed households with speeds of 25 Mbps or greater. Additionally, the company serves 39,000 commercial buildings.
But the company is still working to turn up FiOS assets in California, Texas, and Florida it acquired from Verizon. In the second quarter, Frontier lost 33,000 legacy broadband customers but was able to slow net video and data subscriber losses among FiOS customers.
McCarthy says Frontier remains focused on getting voluntary churn back to benchmark levels and plans to roll out a consumer-friendly FiOS self-installation process in the second half of this year.
More from Frontier’s second quarter earnings report can be found here.