As Frontier moves forward with a common back office for its Vantage IPTV and FiOS services, the service provider can more rapidly deepen the penetration of triple play bundles into new markets.
Dan McCarthy, CEO of Frontier, told investors during the recent Goldman Sachs Communacopia 2016 event that by creating a common triple set that can be carried over fiber and copper facilities, it can more readily scale its IPTV business with minimal capital.
“In the past you might have run into a situation where a provider really spent $40-$70 million to enable an area with IPTV,” McCarthy said. “With the current architecture and using the common building blocks and the OSS and provisioning we already have, you get the ability to go into a market for about anywhere as low as $600,000 to about $2-3 million so it’s a low capital hurdle.”
In March, the service provider began a test of Vantage triple play service in Durham, North Carolina, with plans for general availability. Under the Vantage brand are three main products: Vantage TV, Vantage Internet and Vantage Voice.
One of major elements of the triple play platform is IPTV. During its fourth quarter 2015 earnings call, the service provider announced that it would roll out Vantage TV to over 3 million households over the next three to four years.
“We’re looking to have about 50 percent of our footprint to have these triple play capabilities,” McCarthy said. “We’ll always have our relationship with DISH and provide a synthetic triple play, but in those areas it gives us an opportunity for more revenue, better margin profiles and a chance to have a different conversation.”
By having a common triple play platform, Frontier also has a better story to present to multi-dwelling unit (MDU) owners.
“One of the biggest barriers we had when we would go into to talk to an owner of an MDU was that our synthetic triple play did not work for them and we’d have to put in a mini head end that wasn’t what they wanted,” McCarthy said. “As we put in a Vantage product, we can put in a fiber connection into the complex and use VDSL or use G.fast.”
McCarthy added that this platform has enabled the company to have “conversations today that we could never have before.”
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