As it expands outward along country byways, Frontier Communications Corp. has been attempting to revive its plain, old telephone service with high-speed Internet and satellite video.
The Stamford-based company is heading down the right road, if new federal data is any indicator.
Even as traditional telephone service continues to lose ground, mobile and cable services continued their growth ”“ with mobile Internet service plans seeing a whopping 40 percent in the first half of 2009 during the depths of the recession, according to data from the Federal Communications Commission.
In Connecticut, telephone companies lost more than 110,000 accounts for standard line service between the end of 2008 and June 2009, the FCC determined, a figure that could include lines used for fax machines, security systems, or other uses.
Over that same period, Connecticut residences and businesses subscribed to nearly 50,000 additional voice-over-Internet-protocol accounts, which are sold both through cable television companies like Cablevision, Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable, as well as though online companies like Vonage.
Like the cable companies, traditional telephone companies like AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Frontier have had success selling voice services as part of larger bundles for high-speed Internet and television services.
Entering the third quarter Stamford-based Frontier doubled in size through the acquisition of Verizon accounts in mostly rural parts of 27 states, seeing the opportunity to add high-speed Internet and video customers through bundling. The company now bills itself as the largest “pure rural” telecommunications carrier in the United States, although it has significant customer bases in a few smaller cities like Rochester, N.Y., and Sacramento, Calif. Frontier does not offer service in Connecticut where it is based.
“We launched an aggressive high-speed Internet promotion on August 1 targeted at new customers and win-backs,” said Maggie Wilderotter, CEO of Frontier, in a conference call with investors. “The offer is only available in (the) ”˜double- and triple-play”™ bundles, and based on our past experience, we believe that we can drive incremental market share with all of these offers.”
It marked the second FCC report that tracked voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) service, and so the first that allows policymakers to track trends related to VoIP adoption.
Compared to the national figures, Connecticut telephone companies had a slightly higher rate of loss in “switched access” lines in the industry parlance, those run through telephone switches that create dedicated circuits between callers.
VoIP systems, by comparison, break calls into electronic bits and send them along the best possible routes, a process that is more efficient but which also lacks some of the fail-safe mechanisms offered by the phone company.
Of the 157 million total connections in service at mid-year 2009, 47 percent were residential telephone accounts; 38 percent were business telephone lines; 13 percent were residential VoIP; and 2 percent were business VoIP.
VoIP providers had a slightly better rate of adoption in Connecticut compared to the national figures, up 12 percent here versus 10 percent in the United States as a whole.
