Frontier is seeking permission to retire copper in a portion of its Spencerport, New York, central office service area due to a planned roadwork project.
Like its telco brethren AT&T and Verizon, which have made similar copper retirement plans, customers affected by this change will be transitioned to an FTTH-based network architecture.
After the planned copper retirement, there will no longer be copper loop feeder facilities providing connectivity between Frontier’s Spencerport, N.Y., central office (CO) and the customer premises. Frontier is planning to replace the existing copper loops with fiber drops as part of this project.
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When customers are transitioned to FTTH, Frontier says they can anticipate receiving services that are equivalent to or better than those they received over copper facilities, and at the same prices. While Frontier did not specify the services that it will make available, the service provider will offer customers the same POTS voice service and likely higher bandwidth speeds ranging from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps.
Additionally, service providers that are currently interconnected at this CO location are being notified of the upgrade.
Frontier is hardly alone in having to retire parts of its copper network.
Fellow telco Verizon recently asked the FCC for permission to retire copper in various cities and towns across eight states. The telco also encouraged the regulator to repeal its existing prohibition against disclosing a contemplated copper retirement prior to filing notice.