Frontier’s fiber broadband expansion continues to bear fruit as the service provider scales its customer base, a trend that continues into the fourth quarter.
During the quarter, telco added 97,000 fiber broadband customers, resulting in 19.2% year-over-year growth in fiber broadband customer numbers.
In the company's earnings release, Nick Jeffery, Frontier's president and CEO, said that the company's results reflect its achievement of the growth goals set when the service provider installed a new management team and emerged from bankruptcy in 2021.
“Our goal was to return the company to growth, and in less than four years, we delivered,” he said. “For the first time in more than 15 years, we achieved full-year organic revenue growth, propelled by 19.2% growth in fiber customers and 13.5% in fiber revenues.”
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Accelerating fiber-enabled locations, customers
A key focus of Frontier’s investment strategy is its fiber network expansion.
Frontier said in its 10-K filing that, with its network expansion effort, “we are also working to improve our product positioning in both existing and new fiber markets.”
In 2024 Frontier added about 371,000 consumer fiber broadband customers compared to approximately 303,000 in 2023.
However, Frontier noted that “customers who migrated from our copper base constituted a minor portion of these consumer fiber broadband customer net additions in 2024.”
The service provider also continued to scale the number of locations it passes with fiber. Frontier added 241,000 fiber passings during the quarter and 1.3 million new ones to reach 7.8 million locations passed with fiber.
For the year, Frontier added 385,000 fiber broadband customers, resulting in fiber customer growth of 19.2% year-over-year.
Fiber drives consumer growth
As a result of its aggressive fiber build-outs, Frontier saw growth in consumer revenues.
Consumer revenues rose 3.1% to $798 million due to what Frontier said was “year over year as growth in fiber-based products was partly offset by declines in copper-based products.”
Being a traditional telco, Frontier still had to navigate the challenges of its declining customer base.
While consumer copper revenues dipped 13% during the quarter, Frontier plans to mitigate future losses by expanding the availability of fiber-based broadband services.
“As our copper footprint transitions to fiber, we expect fewer copper sales opportunities,” Frontier said. “We will also proactively migrate certain existing broadband customers from copper to fiber, both of which will reduce our copper net adds.”
Frontier added that its “fiber broadband customer net additions continued to outpace copper broadband customer net losses, resulting in 151,000 total broadband customer net additions.”
ARPU also rose during the quarter. Consumer ARPU was $65.98, up 2.8% year-over-year in the fourth quarter.
Frontier said the rise in APRU was due to several factors, including “higher intake pricing, customer shifts to higher broadband speeds, customers rolling off promotional pricing, and lower gift card redemptions, all partially offset by increased retention activity and autopay take rates.”
Consumer fiber broadband revenue of $436 million increased 23.2% year-over-year, driven by growth in both fiber broadband customers and ARPU.
However, consumer fiber broadband customer churn was 1.31%, up from 1.20% in the fourth quarter of 2023. Likewise, copper churn rose to 2.54% during the quarter.
Frontier reported that overall revenue rose 3% year-over-year to $5.95 billion, as fiber revenue growth of 14% offset copper revenue declines of 8%.
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