Frontier Communications, fresh off their $8.5 billion acquisition of millions of Verizon DSL and landline customers, has been downplaying the fact the company isn’t offering speeds that can successfully compete with cable in most markets. While Frontier CEO Maggie Wilderotter has been promising these customers a “fast future,” the company really isn’t in a financial or technical position to actually offer it. In an interview with the Oregonian, Wilderotter continues along this vein, insisting the company offers fiber to the home “all across the country”:Oregonian: Frontier wasn’t heavily in this kind of cable TV, super-fast Internet business before the transaction. Why did you want these markets?
Wilderotter:Oh, nonsense. We deploy fiber to the home all across the country. We don’t call it FiOS. We call it high-speed Internet. For our customers, the technology doesn’t matter. What matters is access, speed and capacity.Which sounds great, except for the fact that it’s not true. Frontier doesn’t offer fiber to the home anywhere, outside of the 100,000 or so Verizon FiOS customers they acquired in the Pacific Northwest. In fact, the fastest speed Frontier’s capable of offering is 10 Mbps, though many users are closer to 1.5 Mbps. Frontier could follow in Verizon’s footsteps and offer bonded ADSL2+ to some users, but those speeds are distance-constrained, and for many users will top out at 15 Mbps downstream.
In other words, the technology very much matters, and pretending that DSL and fiber are the same thing (which for whatever reason the Oregonian doesn’t feel the need to challenge) is downright bizarre. That said, at least somebody wants to serve these previously neglected Verizon customers, and Wilderotter proceeds to insist they won’t be continually hiking prices on users like Verizon or Comcast. Of course if your network upgrades are going to be of the make believe variety, that’s an easier promise to keep.
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