Frontier continued to grow its fiber presence in 2024, adding fiber subscribers and expanding its fiber footprint while waiting for its acquisition by Verizon to close by early next year.
Impact: In general, Frontier has been relatively quiet since shareholders approved the Verizon deal in November. It hasn’t held an earnings call either of the last two quarters (and won’t throughout 2025) and thus hasn’t provided much commentary on how it plans to proceed with its fiber buildouts while the transaction winds its way through the regulatory process. But Frontier’s fiber numbers still fuel its growth, even though the number of new fiber passings added in Q4 shrunk sequentially and failed to meet the 325,000 predicted by analysts. And Frontier still added 241,000 new fiber passings in Q4 to increase its total fiber coverage to 7.8 million at year-end 2024. For the full year, Frontier added approximately 1.3 million new passings and moved closer to what had been its ultimate goal of 10 million locations passed by the end of this year. Whether Frontier and Verizon will coordinate on fiber expansions over the next few quarters the way Lumos appears to be doing with T-Mobile remains up in the air, but it wouldn’t be surprising if Verizon directs where Frontier should focus its buildouts and how actively it should pursue that 10 million mark.
Frontier also had good news to report on the fiber broadband subscriber front, adding 97,000 new fiber customers in Q4 and 385,000 for the full year. For consumer fiber broadband, those numbers came in at 92,000 and 371,000, respectively. The consumer quarterly net adds increased 13.6% year-over-year but shrunk a surprising 11.5% sequentially, while full year consumer fiber net adds increased 22.4% YOY. Those gains pushed Frontier’s total fiber base up 19.2% YOY and 4.2% sequentially to nearly 2.4 million, with 2.25 million of those on the consumer side. The net adds also easily offset Frontier’s legacy copper broadband losses, which came in at 60,000 for the quarter and 234,000 for the full year, leaving the company with just 702,000 legacy copper broadband subscribers. That’s a decline of 25% YOY but Frontier’s fiber growth meant it ended 2024 with more than 3 million broadband subscribers (2.9 million of which were consumers). An increased focus on driving fiber penetration rates lifted Frontier’s penetration in expansion areas to 19.6% at the end of the year, up from 17.5% to close 2023. When combined with its base fiber penetration rate of 46.2%, Frontier reported a total fiber penetration rate of 30.6% to close 2024, down slightly from 30.9% at year-end 2023.
The Q4 and full-year earnings results provided some insight into Frontier’s progress, with CEO Nick Jeffery describing 2024 as “a landmark year for Frontier, marking the culmination of an ambitious turnaround that started when we emerged from bankruptcy in 2021.” Strong fiber broadband net adds and a record number of new locations passed with fiber helped deliver “strong operational and financial results” and a return to growth for the company. Fiber represented 77% of Frontier’s total broadband customer base and fiber revenue made up 57% of the company’s total revenue at the end of 2024. Much of Frontier’s focus to wrap 2024 centered on the its successes over the past four years following its emergence from bankruptcy, and Jeffery summed up the company’s successful implementation of its ambitious turnaround plan in a statement that explained how the previous four years of growth helped make Frontier an attractive acquisition target for Verizon that he believes will benefits customers and shareholders alike.
