AT&T and Frontier Communications enter 5G agreement

AT&T has entered an agreement with Frontier Communications to bring fibre-optic connectivity to large enterprise customers outside AT&T's current footprint. The two companies signed multi-year strategic agreements that will also support the deployment of AT&T's 5G mobility network.

As the demand for edge computing and 5G networks grows, so too does the need for resilient fibre pathways for a connected society, AT&T said in a statement. Enterprises need more bandwidth to keep data moving fast. By collaborating with Frontier, AT&T will be able to offer large enterprise customers high-speed, low-latency, and highly secure connectivity in markets where it does not own a fibre network or currently plan to build one. 

"With Frontier building out its own fibre network where we are not building, we'll be able to work together to provide large business customers with the high-speed, low-latency data connectivity they need to grow and thrive," said Scott Mair, President, Network Engineering and Operations, AT&T. 

He continued: "As demand for broadband connectivity grows, we will be able to plug and play into Frontier's network to support businesses and help grow our 5G mobility network for consumers."

Mike Shippey, Frontier's Executive Vice President of Business and Wholesale, added: "We're bringing together two complementary networks to benefit business customers that require fibre-optic connectivity. As part of this deal, we'll use our expanding fibre network to provide AT&T high-speed connections for large enterprise customers and the expansion of its 5G mobile network across our markets."

What are AT&T and Frontier providing? 

AT&T says it is building out additional fibre across its wired footprint and plans to reach about 2.5mn incremental customer locations passed by the end of 2021 and 30mn locations by the end of 2025. AT&T's business fibre network enables high-speed connections to over 2.5 million U.S. business customer locations as of September 30, 2021. Nationwide, more than 9 million business customer locations are within 1,000 feet of AT&T fibre. This year, Frontier announced a new strategy to Build Gigabit America, an “aggressive” fibre expansion plan that will pass 10mn locations by the end of 2025 is central to this strategy. 

The company also plans to make fibre available to 600,000 new locations in 2021, resulting in approximately 4mn fibre locations by the end of the year. 

The agreement aims to enable AT&T to quickly reach additional locations by utilising Frontier's complimentary fibre network. Together, the two companies will enable high-speed connectivity to large enterprise customers within Frontier's 25-state footprint, AT&T claimed.