Frontier Plans to Kill Copper

Frontier CEO Nick Jeffery said that the company believes it will be out of the copper business within five years. At the end of the first quarter of 2023, Frontier still had 9.9 million copper passings compared to 5.5 million fiber passings. But that oddly doesn’t translate into a greater number of copper customers, with 1.6 million fiber customers compared to just under 1 million copper customers. This demonstrates the extent to which Frontier has lost DSL customers over the last decade. Frontier shed some customers in the asset sale in the Northwest to Ziply, but most of the customer losses are from DSL customers fleeing to some other technology. Frontier's goal is to reach 10 million fiber passings by the end of 2025, so it will continue to overbuild copper areas with fiber. That should cover about half of the remaining copper passings. My guess is that Frontier won’t have to cut many DSL customers dead in five years. Between their own fiber expansion, the many grant programs, and fiwed wireless access, it seems likely that most of Frontier’s remaining DSL customers will be off copper by then.