Verizon In Talks To Buy Frontier Communications In Fiber Push: Reports

Frontier has a market capitalization of about $10 billion with its stock trading at about $39 a share after market hours Wednesday, up about 11 percent.

Verizon is reportedly in talks to buy rival Frontier Communications to grow its fiber network and better compete with AT&T and other rivals.

The Basking Ridge, N.J.-based telecommunications vendor plans to pay all cash for the deal, which could be announced as soon as Thursday, according to Bloomberg. Frontier bills itself as the largest pure-play fiber provider in the U.S.

The deal for Dallas-based Frontier could face shareholder scrutiny after Verizon paid more than $45 billion for licenses for 5G-friendly wireless spectrum – plus billions of dollars more to use the licenses, according to The Wall Street Journal. The deal comes as Frontier worked on upgrading a legacy copper landline network to fiber.

Verizon-Frontier Deal

CRN has reached out to Verizon and Frontier for comment.

In August, Frontier launched a 7-gig fiber internet service across its entire fiber footprint. The vendor also reported quarterly earnings for the second quarter of 2024, which included revenue of $1.48 billion, 2.1 percent growth year over year.

The vendor added a record 388,000 fiber passings to reach 7.2 million total locations passed with fiber, according to Frontier. It also added a record 92,000 fiber broadband customers, up 18.6 percent year over year.

In 2016, Frontier paid $10.54 billion for Verizon assets that included TV, landline phone, broadband Internet businesses and the fiber-based Fios network in California, Texas and Florida.

Frontier filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020 to reduce its debt by more than $10 billion and provide "significant financial flexibility" to support continued investment in its long-term growth plans.

Frontier has a market capitalization of about $10 billion. Its stock traded at about $39 a share after market hours Wednesday, up about 11 percent.

Verizon has a market cap of about $175 billion. Its stock traded at about $42 a share after hours Wednesday, down about 3 percent.

During its previous quarterly earnings report in July, Verizon executives said the company saw total operating revenue of $32.8 billion, up 0.6 percent year over year. A Morgan Stanley report from the time described it as “a solid quarter, which was largely in line with (our) and consensus expectations.”

Frontier’s recent troubles resulted in it gaining the attention of activist investor JANA Partners – whose previous tech interests have included Rapid7 and New Relic.

In February, JANA publicly applauded Frontier’s announcement that it would conduct a “formal and comprehensive review process of all opportunities to unlock shareholder value.”

The firm implored Frontier to do such a review in a public letter in December, even bringing up “a sale transaction, a strategic partnership/joint venture, and/or the divestiture of non-core copper passings” as potential outcomes. At the time, JANA pointed to “a more than 50% decline in Frontier's stock price in the two-year period through the middle of September” as a sign of Frontier’s failings.