Frontier extends broadband service to nearly 17K addresses to Arizona, Minnesota, and New Mexico homes

Frontier continues to make good on the second phase of its FCC Connect America Fund Phase II (CAF-II) commitments, enabling broadband across nearly 17,000 locations in Arizona, Minnesota and New Mexico.

Frontier began receiving approximately $31 million a year from the CAF-II program to expand and upgrade the company's network to 56,000 locations in Illinois by the end of 2020.

After completing its acquisition of Verizon’s wireline assets in California, Texas, and Florida, Frontier gained an additional $48.5 million in annual CAF support. By gaining this additional funding, Frontier has nearly $331.5 million in total annual CAF support to expand broadband to unserved and underserved locations over 10 years.

RELATED: Frontier leverages CAF-II to deliver broadband to 40K Indiana, Illinois, Texas locations

Like other CAF-II projects it is conducting, Frontier is enabling specific amounts of broadband subscribers in each of these three states:

Arizona and New Mexico: Frontier has made broadband service available to an additional 8,500 households in these southwestern states. Frontier is leveraging CAF-II to bring broadband to approximately 4,200 households in CAF-eligible census blocks while expanding its overall service and reach to approximately 4,300 more households.

In 2016, Frontier began receiving approximately $17 million a year from fund to expand and upgrade the company’s network to 29,000 locations in Arizona and New Mexico by the end of 2020.

Minnesota: Broadband service is being made available to an additional 8,000 households here. Frontier is leveraging the CAF-II program to bring broadband to nearly 3,900 households in CAF-eligible census blocks while expanding its overall service and reach to about 4,100 more households throughout Minnesota.

Similar to a recent move to enable 40,000 homes across portions of three states—Indiana, Illinois and Texas—the CAF program and investments by Frontier are enabling broadband access to previously unserved households, as well as improvements in speeds and services.

However, the telco did not reveal what broadband packages the CAF-II program will enable other than to say that it will offer “simplified broadband offerings and bundled service packages that provide customers with choice and affordable options.”

The telco also added over 190,000 CAF-II households and 500,000 households in adjacent areas in 2016.  

Being able to add more eligible locations that can get broadband service should be one element that Frontier can use to help turn around its broadband addition fortunes.

While the service provider did not yet announce its first-quarter 2017 earnings, Frontier lost over 72,000 broadband customers in the fourth quarter of 2016 while narrowing its California, Texas and Florida (CTF) broadband losses to 65,000 and legacy broadband losses to 8,000 subscribers.