Frontier Communications has been facing pressure to show growth for several years. While they still face that pressure, when it comes to business services, they seem to be doing something right. Frontier Business is showing growth, and that may be where they will continue to focus going forward.
Frontier CEO Nick Jeffery has done a good job at finding and exploiting this new area of growth on the business services side of the company. This has been their focus over the last few years.
If we pull the camera back, we can see that business services growth is not just a Frontier Business story. This is an arena where other large national and regional competitors for wire line and wireless services seem to be successfully focusing for growth.
You see, during the past few decades, wireless and telecom companies were showing strong growth attracting new customers, in many different sectors.
However, over time those sectors have also changed.
Over time traditional wire line telephone services which showed strong growth until roughly the year 2000, have been falling ever since.
The next growth wave came from services like wireless, data networks and VoIP (voice over the Internet). These have been rising for the past couple decades. These have become the new traditional services and have started to slow down in recent years.
As time moves on, new customers became harder to find. So, wireless, data and VoIP competitors started focusing on competing with each other to win market share.
One of these new growth areas in telecom are business services
Today, the marketplace is changing once again. Today, growth seems to be coming from non-traditional areas.
While in the past, competitors never really discussed specific areas like business services, today that is where they are increasingly focused. Now, they want to showcase this area to investors, both for wireless and wire line services.
Today, we are in the early stages of this new growth wave. We don’t know when it will slow down, but for now, business is booming.
Qualcomm chip, network business slows, so moves to IoT, AI, Automotive
It’s not just Frontier which has been having problems in recent years. Most companies in the wireless and wire line space are feeling the squeeze to one degree or another.
Qualcomm which is a leading chipmaker and network builder has been having troubles with growth. So, they have been trying to move into new areas like AI, IoT and Automotive to show stronger growth.
While this seems to be working, the problem is these new sectors are much smaller than their traditional chip and network business.
That is a real challenge for Qualcomm.
AT&T and Verizon have seen their core business slowdown
AT&T and Verizon have both been experiencing slow growth as well. That’s why they recently reached out and acquired WarnerMedia, Yahoo and AOL, which eventually flopped. They recently sold these properties off after years of agony.
Business services seems like a stronger next step in the journey for all these companies.
There are many in the business services sector like Frontier, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, CenturyLink, US Cellular, C Spire Wireless, Xfinity Mobile, Spectrum Mobile, Optimum, Cricket, PureTalk and countless others. Some are more aggressive than others.
These are companies with both a consumer and business side.
Private wireless and Private Networks are two other growth areas
One reason Business Services is becoming a real growth opportunity because even as companies of all sizes are advanced in many different areas, their core communications can be ancient with older gear from players like Nortel, Cisco with older switches and telephones on every desk.
Today, there are an increasing number of competitors serving the business market. Companies like Juniper Communications, Huawei, Betacom, Arista Networks, Aruba Networks, Avaya, VMware, Fortinet, NETGEAR, Palo Alto Networks, IBM, Dell, HPE and others.
That’s why these days, Business Services are proving to be a powerful growth segment. All the competitors represent many different ways of building a communications system for companies.
Juniper Communications, Cisco, Huawei, Betacom, VMware, IBM and more
The good news is, this is the path Frontier Communications is focused on, and has been for several years now.
The bad news is they are only in the wire line side, not wireless. I wish they had moved into wireless like Comcast, Charter and Altice did with Xfinity Mobile, Spectrum Mobile and Optimum.
If they had, it would give them a bigger upside. Frontier Business operation seems focused on the small and mid-sized business market.
Frontier Business may have strong growth opportunity ahead
That being said there are still plenty of small and medium sized businesses which need to update their communications systems as everything seems to be rushing forward at lightning speed.
The need to update networks creates a real growth potential which may help Frontier Communications out of their growth slump and put them on a faster track going forward.
Bottom line, in order to remain competitive and in the game, every company today needs to update their communications systems to do business the way the customer does business.
If not, they will simply lose market share. And that is something every CEO wants to avoid at all costs.
That is a real growth opportunity and challenge for Frontier and all their competitors in the wire line and wireless private wireless market.
Looking forward, Frontier has growth opportunity in enterprise space
I expect the larger Business Services sector to remain on a solid growth track going forward for years to come.
Companies have invited me to visit them, take a tour of their operations and see what they do for their enterprise customers like colleges and Universities, warehouses, factories, plants and every kind of business all need to add AI, IoT, Chatbot technology, the Cloud and so much more.
What I see is very impressive, and a full-steam-ahead approach.
That means every telecom provider will be locked on business and the enterprise as a target for a while. This is the next competitive playing field.
That’s why I fully expect Frontier Communications to keep Frontier Business on the front burner going forward along with all the other competitors in the space.
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