Frontier Drops Opposition to Price Caps After Reaching Deal With Sprint

Telecommunication companies Sprint, Frontier Communications and Windstream Services released a joint filing to the Federal Communications Commission expressing their support for upcoming FCC rules that may place price caps on the data services that power transactions at retail outlets and ATMs. They simultaneously urged the commission to adopt a tiered approach to the new rules for business data services, or BDS, that would favor smaller carriers.

The filing marked an about-face for Frontier, which has long resisted changing the market in which bulk data connections are sold directly to businesses from phone companies. Frontier said the latest agreement is satisfactory. “Yesterday’s filing by Frontier, Windstream, and Sprint reflects a consensus approach which affords the smaller price-cap carriers a reasonable transition period to adjust to potential reductions to BDS rates,” spokesman John Puskar said in a statement.