Frontier Communications is focused on cost containment, spending capital wisely and de-levering. That’s according to new EVP/CFO Perley McBride.
Speaking at the Wells Fargo Securities Technology, Media & Telecom conference on Wednesday, McBride says the thrust of what he’s talking to the Frontier leadership team about is where the telecom company needs to get to.
Frontier has been in integration mode for three years, most recently with Verizon properties in California, Texas and Florida. The company doubled in size with the Verizon deal and recently announced a new organizational structure.
The company had been purely focused on broadband and last week announced it’s now aligned along separate consumer and business customer divisions. How those products are marketed and sold is different, says McBride. “Now we have the scale…to make it an easier transition. The regions, as we had them, created inefficiencies.”
Frontier is now able to streamline its marketing and engineering, making the company “more efficient in how we make decisions and deploy resources.” It’s larger scale allowed the company to negotiate with key vendors and suppliers to improve contract terms, according to the executive.
The heavy lifting of integration is mostly done and now Frontier needs to get better at executing, says McBride. The company has initiatives in place to raise the Fios speeds in markets it inherited from Verizon from six megs to 50 megs. “We expect to have 2M homes by the end of 2017 enabled for higher speeds. On legacy side, we’ll have 170,000 homes passed by the end of this year,” according to McBride.
November 10, 2016
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