Frontier Buying SNET

The big news is that AT&T is selling off its old SNET division to Frontier. I feel sorry for my friends and family in Connecticut as they went from a local RBOC (SNET) to an ambivalent giant to a stingy ILEC (Frontier). Frontier has more public utility commission complaints than either of the evil RBOC twins.

This isn’t the first acquisition for Frontier. In 2009, for an all stock deal valued at $8B, Frontier acquired over 4 million rural lines from VZ. It promised the states that nothing would change. Oops! That FiOS TV service? Yeah. We either raise the rates or cancel it. Fairpoint had a similar problem with VZ assets that resulted in bankruptcy.

Frontier is paying $2 billion for the assets of CT. It already sits on $8 billion in debt (on $4 bill in revenue). It’s a wireline company. You know what that means. Frontier lacks a cloud strategy. It says it will double down on broadband. What does that mean? It has some FiOS assets, some VDSL assets. It resells DISH TV, so maybe it will do something with the new DISH – Sprint LTE trials. Who knows?

The mentality is that bigger is better but when all you are buying is residential wireline and SMB wireline, what’s the future hold?

TeleCompetitor notes that CT won’t deregulate telecom, so that is why ATT wants out of a network that has already been upgraded to U-Verse.

Tags: att, broadband, dsl, mergers, wireline
Related tags: frontier, assets, wireline