A Frontier bankruptcy plan was approved by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York last Friday. The approval outlines Frontier’s restructuring, subject to final documentation.
Frontier first filed for bankruptcy in April of 2020. At the time of its bankruptcy filing, Frontier served 2.6 million broadband customers, across 16.3 million eligible locations.
The Frontier bankruptcy plan will reduce the company’s debt by $10 billion, giving the company what it says it needs to emerge from bankruptcy and position itself for long term growth.
Much of the company’s debt was accumulated from high profile acquisitions of Verizon network assets. The company also suffered from lack of investment in fiber network assets, with too much dependency on legacy DSL services.
Frontier still needs regulatory approvals from additional states and the FCC before it can completely emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy and begin anew. A firm date for the company’s exit has not been announced yet.
“Today’s confirmation marks the beginning of a new and exciting path forward at Frontier,” said Bernie Han, President and Chief Executive Officer in a press release about the Frontier bankruptcy plan. “With a significantly stronger financial foundation, Frontier will be well positioned to accelerate our transformation, invest in infrastructure and drive efficiencies to better serve our customers.”
Unions representing workers at Frontier expressed cautious optimism.
“The bankruptcy plan relieves Frontier of $10 billion in debt, a necessary step that will allow Frontier to make the investments needed to provide the service that its customers want and deserve,” said Beth Allen of Communications Workers of America (CWA) in an emailed statement to Telecompetitor. “In addition, Frontier’s plan protects the benefits and collective bargaining agreements of frontline employees, whose hard work has kept the company afloat through years of mismanagement.”
The CWA is still calling on the FCC and other regulators to closely scrutinize the Frontier bankruptcy plan and ensure badly-needed investments on broadband deployment and service quality are included.
I hope the “restructuring” process includes stopping the practice of “Dialing Back” upload/download speeds via their supplied WiFi units.
After more than five years of complaining about my poor “Fiber Optic” internet connection/speeds and a half dozen tech visits to my home to replace all my equipment that included an installation of a new $75 CAT5 cable, upping my speeds from 50 to 100 and then to 200 mbps, nothing changed except for my bill from $50 to $65 and finally $80 all to no avail.
Frontier’s way of fixing my poor service connection was changing their add verbiage from “Speeds of Up To” to “Wired”….no lie!!
Simply stated, that translates to getting the speeds you pay for only with a wire or cable connection as with an Ethernet “Hard Wire” connection to each and every device.
I can’t, for the life of me, understand why they would mess with their own customers in this way.
Their WiFi boxes can not distinguish cord cutters from cable connections unless you don’t have TV services with them in which case you get dialed back even though you have internet service with them…..cut the cord, or not, and pay for it regardless!
Wether you cut the cord or not in order to save money by streaming content, you are punished in this manner.
Frontier’s tech support admitted doing this via a phone conversation I had with them. When asked why would they do this, Frontier’s tech support responded, “because they all do it” referring to all other Internet Service Providers.
It’s no wonder why Frontier is losing so many customers.
It’s self inflicted!
FYI: my $80 monthly Frontier internet gets 25/25 mbps at best via WiFi. My “hard wired” connection gets “up to” 200/200 mbps depending on the device connected to the modem via an Ethernet CABLE or CORD.