Consolidated Communications’ long-awaited brand change has come today as the service provider will now operate as Consolidated Communications in its FairPoint Communications service area.
The new name comes after Consolidated completed its acquisition of FairPoint, which has a strong network presence in Northern New England, last July.
What was significant about the FairPoint deal is that it was transformational from a fiber network reach perspective. Consolidated became the ninth largest fiber provider with a network that spans 24 states and more than 36,000 route miles.
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Bob Udell, president and CEO of Consolidated, said in a release that the name change is part of the new company’s commitment to minimize the impact to its consumer and business customer base.
“Since closing on the acquisition last July, we've made great progress on many initiatives to upgrade broadband platforms and make it easier for customers to do business with us by delivering new and enhanced products and self-service tools,” Udell said in a release. “This is also an exciting time for our employees as we join together as one team with greater scale and resources to ultimately deliver a better experience to our customers."
Now that it has FairPoint’s assets under its belt, a key focus for Consolidated Communications is to enhance broadband speeds across its Northern New England service area to more than 500,000 homes passed in 2018.
During the rebranding process, Consolidated developed a broadband marketing and promotion strategy centered around extending its higher speed offerings in the parts of FairPoint’s areas that have not been marketed to today via copper and fiber.
The service provider plans to implement VDSL2+ to immediately deliver speeds of 50-100 Mbps using FairPoint’s existing copper facilities. Consolidated will more aggressively market and expand upon FairPoint’s 1 Gbps-capable broadband services, which run over the telco’s existing FTTH network.
Besides boosting broadband speeds, Consolidated plans to offer a series of new residential services over its fiber network including OTT video content, residential VoIP phone service and home security services.
On the business front, Consolidated Communications plans to expand its commercial product portfolio to include unified communications, advanced data networking and cybersecurity services, which will include a mix of cloud and on premise solutions.
Consolidated said existing customers will not be required to change their email addresses as part of the name change.