Frontier to bring 25 Mbps broadband services to 750K new households by 2020

Frontier has set an aggressive timeline to expand broadband to 750,000 more households throughout its service footprint by the year 2020.

Dan McCarthy, president and CEO of Frontier, said in an FCC filing that this commitment will include the wireline properties it is in the process of buying from Verizon (NYSE: VZ) in California, Florida and Texas.  

"Across the entire Frontier footprint, including the properties we propose to acquire in California, Florida and Texas, I commit to deliver broadband to an additional 750,000 households at speeds of 25Mbps/2-3Mbps by the end of 2020," McCarthy said in a letter to the FCC.

Leveraging a mix of its own capital and the second phase of Connect America Funding (CAF II), the service provider will deploy a mix of VDSL2, ADSL2+ bonding, and vectoring technologies to bring the higher speed services over its existing copper network.  

"We will deliver these increased speeds by committing our own private investment and leveraging all currently available technologies, such as VDSL2 (bonded and un-bonded) and ADSL2+ (bonded), and deploying other new technologies as they become commercially available, such as vectoring," McCarthy said. "Frontier's network engineering teams will coordinate this deployment effort with our six year CAF build to ensure maximum benefit to our customers."

Earlier this year, the service provider announced that it would accept $283 million in annual CAF II support from the FCC that it says will enable it to build out broadband service to over 650,000 rural locations it could not make an initial business case to serve.

Within the Verizon footprint, has set ambitious plans for both California and Texas. According to an earlier FCC filing, the service provider will use CAF II funding to deliver 10/1 Mbps to about 77,000 rural locations in California and nearly 37,000 homes in Texas.

But the last mile is only one part of its overall broadband network upgrade plan. The service provider is continuing to enhance its core network by installing new core aggregation routers and distributions to backhaul its last mile broadband network traffic.

"We have invested heavily in our core network and by the first quarter of 2016 we will transport over 2 Tbps of data at peak from the Internet to aggregation routers located in each state we serve," McCarthy said. "New core aggregation routers and distribution switches, combined with our upgraded backbone transport, today enable high speeds by supplementing the copper network with our fiber backbone."

For more:
- see this FCC filing (.pdf)

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