AT&T says it has reached multi-year agreements with Frontier Communications that will see the former using the latter’s fiber to serve large enterprise customers beyond AT&T’s current footprint. The deal also will see Frontier offer fiber infrastructure AT&T’s 5G roll out. The link-up provides AT&T with access to Frontier fiber in 25 states.
AT&T is in the midst of a major fiber deployment initiative that the company expects will add approximately 2.5 million customer locations passed by the end of 2021 and 30 million locations by the end of 2025. However, it has aspirations of serving customers beyond that expanded footprint. Thus, the agreement with Frontier will enable the service provider to reach customers – or help support its 5G mobile services expansion – in areas where the company does not have fiber or plans to deploy it.
Frontier, meanwhile, has embarked on a significant fiber deployment activity of its own (see "Frontier Communications accelerates fiber network expansion"). The company has set a target of passing 10 million locations with fiber by the end of 2025. Within this project, Frontier expects to make fiber available to 600,000 new locations this year, resulting in approximately 4 million fiber locations total passed by year’s end.
“With Frontier building out its own fiber 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,” commented Scott Mair, president, Network Engineering and Operations, at AT&T. “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.”
“We’re bringing together two complementary networks to benefit business customers that require fiber-optic connectivity,” added Mike Shippey, Frontier’s executive vice president of Business and Wholesale. “As part of this deal, we’ll use our expanding fiber network to provide AT&T high-speed connections for large enterprise customers and the expansion of its 5G mobile network across our markets.”
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