Frontier To Buy Rural Verizon Lines For $5.3B

PETER SVENSSON

NEW YORK (AP) — Verizon Communications Inc. said Wednesday it reached a deal to sell scattered phone service areas outside its main Northeastern and Californian territories for $5.3 billion in stock.

The buyer is Frontier Communications Corp., based in Stamford, Conn. The company focuses on serving small towns and rural areas and will triple in size with the deal.

The deal continues Verizon's strategy of focusing on its core areas, where it is upgrading its phone lines to fiber optics, enabling it to offer TV service and faster Internet access. It sold off its phone lines in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont for $2.3 billion last year to FairPoint Communications Inc.

The agreement would give Frontier 4.8 million phone lines to residential and small business customers and 1 million broadband connections. Frontier currently has 2.3 million customers.

The sale includes all of Verizon's phone lines in Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin as well as some assets in border areas of California.