{"id":5932,"date":"2020-01-21T14:28:52","date_gmt":"2020-01-21T19:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/?p=5932"},"modified":"2020-01-21T14:29:09","modified_gmt":"2020-01-21T19:29:09","slug":"frontier-communications-plans-to-file-for-bankruptcy-protection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/2020\/01\/21\/frontier-communications-plans-to-file-for-bankruptcy-protection\/","title":{"rendered":"Frontier Communications plans to file for bankruptcy protection"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Frontier Communications is planning to file for bankruptcy\nwithin two months, Bloomberg\nreported last week<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The telco “is asking creditors to help craft a\nturnaround deal that includes filing for bankruptcy by the middle of March,\naccording to people with knowledge of the matter,” Bloomberg wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frontier CEO Bernie Han and other company executives\n“met with creditors and advisers Thursday and told them the company wants\nto negotiate a pre-packaged agreement before $356 million of debt payments come\ndue March 15,” the report said. The move would likely involve Chapter 11\nbankruptcy to let Frontier “keep operating without interruption of\ntelephone and broadband service to its customers.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frontier reported<\/a> having\n$16.3 billion in long-term debt as of September 30, 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We contacted Frontier about the report of its bankruptcy\nplan and will update this story if we get a response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frontier offers residential and business services in 29 states<\/a> over\nits fiber and copper networks. Frontier offers broadband, TV, and phone\nservices and reported revenue of $2 billion and a net loss of $345 million in\nthe most\nrecent quarter<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ISP\nFrontier is failing so badly it won\u2019t take questions from investors<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frontier has been losing customers and reducing its staff.\nIts residential-customer base dropped from 4.15 million to 3.81 million in the\n12-month period ending September 30, 2019, including a loss of 90,000 customers\nin the most recent quarter. Also, in that 12-month period, Frontier’s\nbusiness-customer base declined from 422,000 to 381,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Frontier had 19,132 employees as of September 30,\n2019, down from 21,375 one year earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frontier’s financial performance last year was so bad that\nit refused\nto take any questions<\/a> from investors during its quarterly earnings\ncall in August. Frontier is in the process of selling<\/a> its\noperations in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana to WaveDivision Capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many customer problems<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frontier’s decline is partly due to the decreasing relevance\nof its copper networks and its failure to properly maintain those old phone\nlines. But Frontier has also provided poor customer service on its modern fiber\nnetworks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Subscribers suffered outages immediately after Frontier’s\n2014 purchase<\/a> of AT&T’s wireline network in Connecticut and Frontier’s\n2016 purchase<\/a> of Verizon’s FiOS and DSL networks in California,\nFlorida, and Texas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frontier\ncustomer bought his own router\u2014but has to pay $10 rental fee anyway<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frontier Communications failed to properly maintain its\ntelecom network in Minnesota, leading to “frequent and lengthy” phone\nand Internet outages, an investigation by the state Commerce Department found\nin January 2019<\/a>. The investigation led to a settlement<\/a>.\nNew York state officials are also investigating<\/a> Frontier\nover its repeated outages and long repair times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many Frontier customers in different states have been hit\nwith giant\novercharges<\/a> and cancellation\nfees<\/a>, or draconian policies like one requiring customers to pay\nfor router rentals<\/a> even when they have purchased their own router.\n(A new\nUS law<\/a> scheduled to take effect in June 2020 would ban that practice.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Windstream, a telco that offers service in 18 states, filed\nfor bankruptcy in February 2019<\/a>. Windstream in November 2019 said<\/a> its\nlatest quarterly revenue was “$1.27 billion compared to $1.38 billion in\nthe same period a year ago.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Frontier Communications is planning to file for bankruptcy within two months, Bloomberg reported last week. The telco “is asking creditors to help craft a turnaround deal that includes filing for bankruptcy… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"12","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","default_image_id":71799,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}