Frontier: A Major Telecom Monopoly Fails America

Frontier Communications recently declared bankruptcy, following a history of increasingly unsustainable acquisitions. It also just missed its milestone for the Connect America Fund, which required the company to deploy obsolete 10/1 Mbps service to 80 percent of the funded locations by the end of 2019 in return for more than $1.5 billion in subsidies. Some 774,000 locations should have at least 10/1 Mbps service by the end of 2020 from a company Consumer Reports repeatedly finds to be one of the worst Internet Service Providers in the nation.

And the week of April 13, Frontier told the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that there are 17,000 census blocks in which it is now offering 25 Megabits per second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload. This means well over 400,000 Americans now live in areas no longer eligible for the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, a $20.4 billion program to expand rural broadband. In the filing, the company also identified census blocks where it believes other providers will deploy broadband access through state-funded programs, making those locations ineligible for the federal funds as well. If Frontier is exaggerating its coverage, now is the time to investigate before those households miss out on a massive opportunity to get high-quality Internet service from a company that, unlike Frontier, has basic competence.