Frontier CEO says copper decommissioning is 3-5 years out

Frontier Communications still has hundreds of thousands of copper passings, but it doesn’t seem like that footprint will be taken offline anytime soon. CEO Nick Jeffery said the operator thinks it can get more bang for its buck deploying fiber than decommissioning copper—at least in the short term. He said Frontier has studied the process in “great detail,” with early pilots showing “it’s possible” and “an important source of savings.” But, he added, Frontier expects the majority of savings in the short term to come from fiberizing copper customers rather than decommissioning copper. Jeffery said it is making “very targeted investments” in its copper network, for instance in areas where weather events disproportionately degrade performance. He added it has started communicating with its copper customers again, “which is something the old Frontier had never done.” Frontier isn’t planning to convert all of its copper customers to fiber. Frontier’s Chief Strategy Officer Vishal Dixit previously said it will see how many additional copper customers it can reach with the help of government subsidies. The remainder will either keep or potentially divest in “some sort of asset swap.”