Frontier's Wilderotter: Our hick customers don't need more than 6 Mbps

Tom Paine

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At the J.P. Morgan 41st Annual Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in Boston last week, Stamford, Connecticut-based Frontier Communications (NYSE: FTR) Chairman & CEO Maggie Wilderotter implied that most of its largely rural customer base did not really need (or want) much faster broadband speeds.

"In a lot of the big urban markets [like Boston] there a lot more power users, but a lot of our rural customers are not power users so 80 percent in our footprint use 6 Mbps or less, so the target sweet spot for these promotional offers we are putting in place is an aggressive price point that gets people on basic service - that that's all they need," Wilderotter said. She did say that in 42% of its footprint Frontier can offer 20 Mbps and it can offer 12 Mbps to 54%.

In May of 2009, Frontier acquired 4.8 million access lines - mostly rural and copper-based, from Verizon for $8.6 billion, tripling the size of the company (the deal closed in 2010).