The deal also covers use of Frontier fibre for AT&T’s 5G mobile network, the companies said.
Scott Mair (pictured), AT&T’s president of network engineering and operations, said: “With Frontier building out its own fibre network where we are not building, we’ll be able to work together to provide large business customers with the high-speed, low-latency data connectivity they need to grow and thrive.”
Mike Shippey, Frontier’s executive VP of business and wholesale, added: “As part of this deal, we’ll use our expanding fibre network to provide AT&T high-speed connections for large enterprise customers and the expansion of its 5G mobile network across our markets.”
Frontier has seen a revival since last year, when it briefly went into chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Now largely under new management as well as ownership, it has speeded up its fibre building programme.
A joint statement from the two companies said: “An aggressive fibre expansion plan [by Frontier] that will pass 10 million locations by the end of 2025 is central to this strategy. The company expects to make fibre available to 600,000 new locations in 2021, resulting in approximately 4 million fibre locations passed by the end of the year.”
AT&T’s Mair said: “As demand for broadband connectivity grows, we will be able to plug and play into Frontier’s network to support businesses and help grow our 5G mobility network for consumers.”
Shippey said: “We’re bringing together two complementary networks to benefit business customers that require fibre-optic connectivity.”
AT&T said that, separately from its use of Frontier fibre, it “is building out additional fibre across its wired footprint and plans to reach about 2.5 million incremental customer locations passed by the end of 2021 and 30 million locations by the end of 2025”. AT&T said its business fibre network enables high-speed connections to over 2.5 million US business customer locations as of the end of September 2021.
