Frontier Communications might not be a traditional wireless player, but the telco revealed during Adtran's Connect event in Huntsville, Ala.,last week that it is seeing growing demand to provide Wi-Fi services to local businesses. Its recent win to wire the American Tobacco Campus in Durham, N.C., with Wi-Fi is an example of this trend, reports our sister publication FierceTelecom.
Built on the former Lucky Strike tobacco plant, the campus is unique in that its 75 companies have their own Wi-Fi access points. It also includes a baseball stadium for the local Bulls minor league team and an outdoor concert amphitheater. Although the initial deal is focused on providing Wi-Fi, it's also a three-year deal that could enable it to upsell additional services to each of the campus' tenants.
Dennis Bloss, vice president and GM for North Carolina at Frontier Communications, said the deal "opens up a lot of other opportunities for us and drives ARPU in our traditional services because we're providing Gigabit redundant connectivity to this campus to drive this Wi-Fi network."
He noted that Frontier is also seeing interest in its Wi-Fi services from a number of minor-league teams across its soon-to-be-28-state footprint. In addition, Bloss indicated that the FCC's recent E-Rate ruling to allocate $2 billion over the next two years to equip more schools and libraries with Wi-Fi connections could create new opportunities for Frontier to pursue in local school districts. For more, see this FierceTelecom article.