Frontier Communications is aggressively expanding its fiber footprint and Veronica Bloodworth, the company’s chief network officer, told investors at the New Street Research Fiber to the Future virtual conference this week that she is confident that it will meet its goal of delivering fiber to 1 million locations this year and ultimately outfitting 10 million locations with fiber by the end of 2025. At the end of 2021 the company had about 4 million fiber-enabled locations.
Bloodworth said that labor and materials are the biggest challenge to achieving this goal but she believes the company has the right strategies in place to resolve any potential issues. One of those strategies is to have a diverse pool of suppliers that they can rely upon. Bloodworth said that by having a diverse set of suppliers the company was able to achieve its goal of expanding fiber to 600,000 locations in 2021 even during the winter months when there was a surge of Covid-19 infections. “We always work to bring on new suppliers to strengthen our supply chain,” she said.
And she also said that many new vendors are entering this space because they see an opportunity and that she believes more labor will become available because of these new entrants. However, she did admit that some materials such as network electronics are constrained right now due to the global chipset shortages but she added that Frontier is carefully managing its supplies.
Despite inflation driving up the costs of some supplies, Bloodworth said that she is working closely with suppliers to keep costs in check and the company still estimates its per-location cost to deliver fiber to a location is between $900 to $1,000.
Frontier plans to aggressively pursue various government broadband funding opportunities and Bloodworth said that there are many locations within its footprint that qualify for this support. However, she wouldn’t provide any specifics about whether Frontier will increase its goal of delivering fiber to 10 million locations by 2025 if it gets government funding for some of its buildout. “I like to build as much as I can and if we can do more, we will,” she said.
10-gig services are possible but expensive
Earlier this year Frontier debuted a 2-gig internet offer throughout its entire fiber footprint. Bloodworth said that to get that 2-gig offering in place the company had to add more capacity in the central office and add splitter hubs in the cabinets closer to the homes. She also said that once a customer orders the 2-gig services, they will have to switch to a new 2-gig router.
Interestingly, Bloodworth said that Frontier’s network is fully capable of offering other multi-gig services such as a 5-gig or 10-gig service. But to deliver those services, customers will need a new in-home router and right now those routers are expensive.