CEO: Frontier Emergency Phone Service Will Target Rural Areas, VoIP on Tap Too

Frontier Communications plans to offer a landline phone service designed for emergency use only, said Frontier CEO Maggie Wilderotter. He said Frontier is planning a residential VoIP product to be launched in the second half of 2014.

Frontier’s planned emergency phone service targets rural areas, which represent a large portion of Frontier’s customer base.

Like all local phone companies, Frontier is seeing customers canceling landline service and moving to cellular or other alternatives. But as Wilderotter noted, rural areas experience frequent power outages. And because traditional phone service is powered from the phone company’s central office, it could provide a reliable communications method even during an extended outage.

Frontier believes there is a market for an emergency landline phone, which would be capable only of dialing Frontier or a 911 operator. The service will have “four nines” reliability, Wilderotter said, using telecom jargon for a service that is available 99.99% of the time.