Frontier is still losing broadband subscribers in California, more so in rural areas than in urban areas, but either way the counts are dropping. That’s according to Frontier’s third quarter 2017 financial report and presentation. The good news? Frontier says it’s not bleeding as fast as it was.
Frontier first separates its results out into what it calls “CTF”, short for California, Texas and Florida, and “legacy”, which is what it had before it bought out Verizon’s wireline systems in those three states. California accounts for about four-fifths of the subscribers Frontier acquired in that transaction and apparently about the same proportion of its losses. At least going by the very vague characterisation company executives gave during a conference call with investment analysts, as quoted by the website Seeking Alpha: “California is somewhere in between” Texas and Florida.
Then within the CTF group, Frontier breaks its subscriber trend numbers into DSL and FiOS categories. The FiOS households are primarily in urban and suburban communities, particularly in the affluent coastal counties of southern California, where Verizon invested in fiber. DSL subscribers, on the other hand, are in a dog’s breakfast of often decaying copper systems that trace their legacy back to a variety of rural telcos that were strung together over the years into a collection that Verizon couldn’t be bothered to upgrade and couldn’t wait to dump.
And that Frontier can’t hang onto. It ended the third quarter with 19,000 net fewer DSL subscribers in the three state group, again with California likely accounting for four-fifths, or roughly 15,000 households. That’s a little better than the previous trend since it closed its purchase of Verizon’s systems, when quarterly DSL losses swung between something like 18,000 and 24,000 in California, using the four-fifths ratio as a rough guide.
On the positive side, Frontier is doing better at keeping its FiOS subscribers, losing a net of only 11,000 across the three states in the third quarter, down from 44,000 in the second quarter. And way down from a high of 76,000 net sub losses in the second quarter of 2016, when Frontier fumbled its California hand off.