Frontier Purchase Won't Change Fixed Wireless Strategy: Verizon CEO

WASHINGTON, September 9, 2024 – Just because Verizon inked a $20 billion deal to buy Frontier and its 7.2 million fiber passings doesn’t mean the company’s backing off of fixed wireless, Verizon’s CEO said Monday.

“Doing the Frontier deal does not change anything in my appetite to continue with fixed wireless,” Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg said at a Goldman Sachs conference Monday. “I think it’s just a unique product that’s competing well.”

Verizon stands to gain Frontier’s 2.2 million fiber subscribers, bringing its total to about 10 million. The company has 3.8 million subscribers to fixed broadband via excess capacity on its 5G network, behind T-Mobile’s 5.5 million but well ahead of AT&T’s 350,000.

Analysts say the government could find the deal reduces competition in areas where both Verizon’s fixed wireless and Frontier’s fiber are available, but that the overlap is small and the deal has good odds of regulatory approval.

Vestberg has said for a while that he plans to offer more detail on the company’s fixed wireless plans once it hits its target of 4-5 million subscribers.

“For anyone that can count, there’s only days until we’re there, probably,” he said Monday. “Then I will come back and talk in more general terms about how we continue with fixed wireless access, how we continue with broadband in general.”

He said the company may in the future find an area with such high demand for fixed wireless that it builds 5G infrastructure for that purpose, but in the near term it’s still a secondary consideration to mobile broadband.

Some industry analysts have said that this would be a losing proposition, though. New Street Research estimated in an August report that the big three wireless carriers would each lose money building cell sites just for fixed wireless customers, which are less valuable than mobile. 

The research house estimated that Verizon has enough spectrum capacity to handle about 7 million total fixed wireless customers. Verizon has countered that New Street’s assumed average usage number was too high, and the company’s true capacity was higher.