12 Days of Broadband

A Year of Telecom Mergers and Acquisitions

The wireless carriers are expected to continue scooping up fiber providers.

Jake Neenan

Dec 30, 2024 — 4 min read

Fiber broadband saw a flurry of major deals in 2024. Major mobile carriers are expected to continue snapping up fiber providers in the coming year, as they look to offer converged services in a regulatory environment that looks to be getting friendlier.

News that Verizon was looking to acquire Frontier in early September was seen by analysts as the beginning of this trend in earnest. The deal, valued at $20 billion, would see Verizon take on Frontier’s 7.6 million-location footprint across 25 states in addition to the carrier’s existing 18 million fiber passings. It’s expected to close in mid-2025.

The 12 Days of Broadband (click to open)

On the First Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me:
An extra-planetary-life-promoting tech billionaire set on electing a president.
On the Second Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me: 23 million served by the Affordable Connectivity Program.
On the Third Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me:
3rd year without the Federal Communications Commission having spectrum auction authority.
On the Fourth Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me:
$42.5 billion in Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment funds already allocated.
On the Fifth Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me:
5,500 active satellites currently in Low-Earth Orbit.
On the Sixth Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me:
More than 6 years of service at the FCC by Commissioner and Chairman-designate Brendan Carr.
On the Seventh Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me:
More than 70 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually consumed by data centers in the U.S.
On the Eighth Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me:
$8.1 billion dollars in annual Universal Service Funds.
On the Ninth Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me:
$90 billion in global telecom Merger & Acquisition deals value in 2024.
On the Tenth Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me:
100 broadband-related rulemakings at the FCC relying on Chevron Deference.
On the Eleventh Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me:
Nearly 11 years to complete the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, complete with defaulted locations.
On the Twelfth Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me:
12 Senators and Representatives signing the Andreessen-Horowitz “Little Tech” agenda.

All told, the first three quarters of 2024 saw global telecom M&A deal value surge to approximately $90 billion, according to Bain & Co.. This represented a significant increase from about $24 billion during the same period in 2023. The Americas accounted for 63% of this global total.

“We have been arguing for a couple of years that all the fiber assets would eventually be rolled up into the three big national carriers,” New Street Research’s Jonathan Chaplin wrote at the time. “We thought the big deals would start in earnest in late 2025 or 2026. But we always knew that if one carrier started the process, others would have to follow swiftly because there are three wireless carriers and only one fiber asset in every market with a fiber asset.”