Frontier’s Bankruptcy Reveals Why Big ISPs Choose to Deny Fiber to So Much of America

Even before it announced that it would seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Frontier had a well-deserved reputation for mismanagement and abusive conduct. In an industry that routinely enrages its customers, Frontier was the literal poster-child for underinvestment and neglect, an industry leader in outages and poor quality of service, and the inventor of the industry's most outrageous and absurd billing practices. As Frontier’s bankruptcy has shown, there was no good reason it—and all old big Internet service providers—couldn’t provide blazing-fast fiber on par with services in South Korea and Japan. The reason American Internet lags so far behind South Korea, Japan, and Norway isn’t because fiber isn’t profitable. It just falls under the old adage “you have to spend money to make money,” an anathema to American ISPs’ entrenched position of prioritizing short-term profit over making lasting investments. So long as major national ISPs continue to operate with that same short-term mindset, they will never deliver high-speed fiber to the home broadband of their own accord. If they will not do it, then policymakers need to be thinking about incentivizing others to do it.