Verizon looks to expand its fiber footprint, announces acquistion of Frontier

Today Verizon announced plans to buy Frontier Communications in a deal worth $20 billion. This move would greatly expand the reach of the Verizon fiber network, which it offers under the name Verizon Fios.

Verizon hopes this deal will go through smoothly and predicts it will close in about 18 months. The bigger question is how this might affect Verizon Fios and Frontier customers. Honestly, you shouldn’t expect much in the way of immediate changes, especially since the deal might take well over a year to work out. Even then, it usually takes a while before customers see any front-facing changes.

Long-term, this could set Verizon up to be a much larger player in the fiber game, as well as open it up to higher speed tiers. For example, Verizon currently offers plans from 300Mbps to two gigs, while Frontier has plans that range as high as 5 gigs. Buying Frontier’s resources could help it improve speeds and allow it to offer these higher-end packages to more customers than ever before.

Currently, Verizon Fios has a somewhat limited footprint, despite reaching 7.4 million customers. You’ll find service in just nine states, as well as Washington DC. Even then, this is only in select cities typically. For the rest of the country, Verizon only offers mobile-based services including its Verizon 5G Home Internet. The addition of Frontier could be a big game-changer. The latter has a much wider reach, since it’s available in 25 states, even if the service only has 2.2 million subscribers in total.