Frontier's fiber focus drives revenue and customer gains amid copper decline

Frontier’s dedication to focus its efforts on enhancing its fiber network for consumers and businesses continues to bode well for the telco, raising not only its fiber reach but also its fiber customer base in the third quarter.  

During the third quarter, the service provider added 326,000 fiber passings to reach 8.8 million total locations passed with fiber and 133,000 fiber broadband customers, resulting in fiber broadband customer growth of 20.2% year-over-year.

"Our investment strategy is focused on expanding our fiber network,” the company said in its third-quarter 10Q filing. “In conjunction with this strategy, we are also working to improve our product positioning in both existing and new fiber markets.”

Nick Jeffery, President and CEO of Frontier, said, “We are committed to maintaining this momentum as we join forces with Verizon to ensure more Americans have access to high-speed fiber internet.”

Balancing fiber and copper results

Frontier’s dedication to growing its fiber broadband base continued to influence the service provider’s overall consumer revenues.

As growth in fiber-based products was partly offset by declines in copper-based products, consumer revenue increased 4.7% year-over-year to $826 million. Consumer fiber broadband revenues increased 25.8% year-over-year to $521 million, driven by growth in both fiber broadband customers and ARPU.

“This improvement is a result of higher consumer fiber broadband ARPU as well as increased consumer fiber broadband net customer additions due to our expanded fiber footprint and continued focus on product positioning in both new and existing markets,” Frontier said.

Driven by growth in fiber broadband customers, partially offset by losses in copper broadband, voice, and video customers, Frontier gained about 52,000 and 142,000 consumer customers for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2025, compared to a gain of approximately 22,000 and 47,000 consumer customers for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2024, respectively.

Frontier said that “customer gains were driven by net additions of fiber broadband customers, partially offset by reductions in our copper broadband and stand-alone voice customers” and that  “customer preferences as well as our fiber investment initiatives resulted in an increase in the number of our consumer broadband customers and a migration of our customer base to fiber.”

For the three months ended September 30, 2025, Frontier gained nearly 80,000 consumer broadband customers, up from 49,000 in the same period a year ago. Likewise, Frontier noted that the average monthly consumer revenue per customer (ARPC) increased $0.07, or 0.1%, to $83.19 and $0.51, or 1%, to $84.02 for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2025, respectively, compared to the prior year periods.

The increase for the three and nine-month periods was driven primarily by growth in fiber data and value-added services, along with price increases, partially offset by declines in voice and video services.

“With our investment strategy to expand and improve our fiber network and the corresponding fiber focus of our sales and marketing efforts, we are experiencing growth in fiber revenue and a decline in copper revenue,” Frontier said. “We expect this trend to continue and accelerate due to strong fiber demand and the migration of customers from copper to fiber as we expand our fiber network.”

Being a traditional wireline telco, Frontier continues to balance its consumer and business fiber gains as its copper base dwindles. Consumer copper broadband revenues declined about 19% for the three months ended September 30, 2025, as compared to the prior year periods.

“As our copper footprint transitions to fiber, we expect fewer copper sales opportunities and will proactively migrate certain existing broadband customers from copper to fiber, both of which will reduce our copper customer base and revenues,” Frontier said.

Frontier’s overall revenue rose 4.1% year-over-year to $1.55 billion as growth in fiber-based products was partly offset by declines in copper-based products.

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