ELKHART — Frontier Communications, based in Connecticut, came to Elkhart County in July 2010 when it acquired Verizon Communications’ local wireline operations in 14 states, including Indiana. Local residents who used Verizon for telephone and Internet service became customers of Frontier almost overnight.

The all-stock transaction was valued around $8.6 billion and positioned Frontier as the largest pure rural telecommunications carrier in the nation. In addition, the acquisition boosted Frontier’s 2010 revenue by $2.76 billion to $3.80 billion, a 79 percent increase over 2009 sales. Without that bump in revenue, the company’s recipients in 2010 would have been 3 percent below the 2009 results.

On Wednesday, Frontier chairman and CEO Maggie Wilderotter was in Elkhart. She had lunch with local officials and customers at the Lerner Theatre and then visited the RV/MH Hall of Fame where she made a $10,000 donation.

Wilderotter was ranked in 2009 by Fortune magazine as one of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” and in 2010 was appointed by President Barack Obama as vice chair of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee.

She was able to sit down for a few minutes Wednesday to discuss the future of telephones and Internet piracy.

Frontier’s business is landlines and broadband cable but everybody’s going to wireless technology. What is the future for Frontier?

MW: Well, I think a lot of people don’t realize that wireless capability has more to do with the telephone landline network than everybody thinks…. The only thing wireless for your cellphone is that cellphone to the nearest cell tower. Once it hits that cell tower, everything’s on the wireline network. So we are the fabric behind and the backbone behind wireless communications in the United States.

In addition to that, we provide wireless broadband in every one of our households that we serve. So when you sign up for Frontier high-speed internet service, we put a wireless modem in your home so you can use smart devices, you can use a PC, you can use a laptop and you can use it in any room in your home.

So when we think about the services we offer, it’s not just a traditional landline service. It’s really landline, wireless and wireline, so you have the combination of both capabilities.

With communications technology racing ahead, what is the future for wireline?

MW: If you think about it, the landline infrastructure to the home and business today is the foundation for our broadband infrastructure. So our broadband network runs along that landline service and we’ve upgraded our networks for hybrid fiber and copper to the home. And with new technologies that we’ve been able to deploy, we’re now delivering 50 and 75 megabyte service over that infrastructure to homes, and to businesses we can deliver up to a gigabyte of data capacity. So there’s a lot of capability on the network we have in place that we’ve invested in.

Is Frontier serving the customers, specifically in the rural areas, that AT&T, Verizon and these companies just don’t deal with?

MW: Yes. … We look at rural as our sweet spot because these are markets that many of the bigger players don’t spend money on. They want to be in the big cities and by the time they start to look at where they were doing business from a rural perspective, they don’t have any capital left over to invest. So we bought all of Verizon’s rural properties in 14 states about 20 months ago, which includes Elkhart, and we’ve been investing in these markets. Frontier invested over $750 million in 2011 in broadband, in our infrastructures, in our networks to improve service to rural America.

We firmly believe if you decide you want to live in a smaller rural community, you should have the same telecommunication services as a large city. You shouldn’t be left behind.

How big is that rural market and can it support Frontier?

MW: Absolutely. We have over 4 million customers today. There are probably 45 to 50 million people that live in rural communities like we serve. We think it’s very important that Americans who live in smaller communities have great telecommunication service.

Frontier customers in Elkhart have complained about spotty reception and customer service not providing the answers they need. What is Frontier doing to correct these issues?

MW: Well, when we took over these properties, there were, as I said, a lack of investment over a multiple-year period of time. So over the last 18 months, we’ve been upgrading the networks so we get rid of the spotty service so we can deliver a consistent experience to customers. We’ve expanded broadband to thousands of households that didn’t have it before. We have just converted these markets, including Elkhart, off of these old Verizon legacy systems onto new IT systems so the customer service will be improved also to the customer and the billing will be improved to the customer.

So we have gone through a lot of change. We’ve tried to be as proactive as we can in keeping customers up to speed on what we’re doing but change is always tough and we have had some checks and balances along the way that we’ve had to, of course, correct and fix. But I think customers in this area will see we’re now to the other side of all these major changes. They’ll see a consistent level of positive service from Frontier.

As you have explained, Frontier provides the infrastructure but someone else provides the content. Congress has been considering anti-piracy bills. What is Frontier’s position on this Internet copyright issue?

MW: Well, again, we are a network provider. We are not in the content business itself, we are pretty content agnostic. But I believe if you create content…it’s intellectual property and that should be owned by the company who creates the content and they should be paid for that intellectual property if somebody else wants to use it. And I know on the Internet that’s tough to do because people will take a story and automatically it’s on 25 websites but there should be a process to protect intellectual property so the people who create that content are appropriately compensated for the work that they’ve done.

Even though Frontier does not provide content, how could an anti-piracy law impact its operations?

MW: I actually don’t know if we would be impacted or not. There might be certain reporting we would have to do or we might be asked to take certain content off the air, so to speak, if in fact it’s violating copyright laws. But we would have to see what the legislation actually looks like. But typically because we’re content agnostic we’re simply a delivery pipe. The legislation is more about the providers that are running over our network and not necessarily about us in delivering that content because we can’t police everything that people have on the Internet.

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