Frontier Communications’ multi-year fibre expansion roadmap calls for the company to ramp deployments to 1.6 million new passings by 2023, with a sizable portion of those in West Virginia. The operator announced plans to invest $100 million in expanding to 100,000 new locations in the state this year alone.
Elkins, Fairmont, Grafton, Hinton, Logan, Nitro, Princeton, St. Albans, Weirton, and Woodsdale will be among the towns targeted for rollouts. The new passings will be added to the more than 125,000 Frontier has already been constructed in the state over the last two years. Beckley, Bluefield, Charleston, Clarksburg, Falling Waters, Huntington, Hurricane, Inwood, Kanawha City, Morgantown, Parkersburg, Scott Depot, and Wheeling are already covered.
Frontier received $1.7 million in July 2022 in grant funding from West Virginia to reach just under 3,000 locations in Mason and Boone Counties there. At the time it promised $5.4 million in matching funds to get the projects done.
In a press release, the operator stated that its 2023 expansion plan will supplement, rather than replace, the grant passings. None of the target cities announced on Thursday are located in counties served by the grant funding. Altice USA, Comcast, Shenandoah Telecommunications (Shentel), and Citynet are among the other operators in West Virginia.
Frontier also won $247.6 million in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction in 2020 to cover 79,391 passings in West Virginia, though it later sought to relinquish a handful of the census blocks where it won funding.
Though Frontier is aiming to connect 10 million locations with fibre by 2025, it hasn’t revealed much about where work is being done other than to say it is building in more than a dozen states.
Attempts by Fierce to locate some of its non-grant activity in October 2022 revealed deployment plans in California, Indiana, Illinois, Texas, and New York. That same month, the operator stated that it hoped to reach 300,000 new passings in Connecticut by 2025.
Aside from West Virginia, it has received grants in California, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It also appears to be on track to receive funding in Michigan.