Cable and internet company Frontier Communications will relocate its corporate headquarters from Connecticut to Dallas, creating as many as 3,000 new jobs in Texas.
CEO Nick Jeffery said the move is being made to promote Frontier, one of the 10 largest cable and internet providers in the country, as a local and national telecommunications company. Dallas already is the corporate home of telecommunications giant AT&T and Verizon is working on a major expansion of its regional campus in Irving.
“Texas was an obvious place for us to be based,” said Jeffery, who already lives in Dallas. “Dallas is geographically located right at the center of the country, which makes it great for Frontier because we’re coast to coast, and there’s great talent availability. We’re making the ‘Gigahub’ our center for digital development.”
Frontier has 2.9 million customers in 25 states and revenue of $5.79 billion in 2022 after adding 250,000 new fiber broadband customers during the year.
After exiting Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2020, the company signed a lease for a 95,000-square-foot space on McKinney Avenue in Uptown in early 2022. The McKinney office, dubbed the “Gigahub” by Jeffery, will be able to employ up to 1,000 people, Jeffery said.
Frontier said it expects to create 3,000 jobs in Texas over the next 10 years, injecting a $3.8 billion boost to the local and state economies. The company said it will spend $1 million every week to upgrade and improve its fiber-optic network in Dallas.
The relocation comes three weeks after Frontier asked the city of Dallas for help in getting tax incentives as it weighed moving its headquarters from Norwalk, Conn., to either Dallas, Tampa or another location.
The company has 300 employees working out of its 48,000-square-foot office building in Connecticut. Jeffery said the company will keep its Norwalk space, and will not formally move any of its employees from Connecticut to Dallas.
“This is not signaling a wholesale shift of people. This is saying Dallas is the new hub and the center where we’ll build out from in the future,” Jeffery said.
Frontier’s move is Dallas-Fort Worth’s biggest relocation since last summer, when industrial giant Caterpillar formally designated its new Irving office as its corporate hub.
“Why don’t we just take the whole building?”
Before it became Frontier’s Dallas office, the historic building that once housed the headquarters of Dallas’ HKS Architects played host in a tiny office space where Jeffery and a small team gathered to discuss where its new offices could be. One day, Jeffery asked if it would be possible to occupy the building.
“Whilst we were looking for a new office space, one day, I said to the head of HR, ‘Why don’t we just take the whole building?’ ” Jeffery said. “So now we’ve really reinvented it into something modern as we drive our turnaround to become the leading fiber provider in the U.S.”
Before Jeffery became Frontier’s chief executive, the company had largely been dependent on a shrinking market based on “yesterday’s technology” in copper DSL, copper phone lines that transmit internet and TV signals, Jeffery said.
Since then, the company has invested in fiber technology, a faster way of providing internet to homes by transmitting data through fiber-optic cable instead of copper. Jeffery said the Dallas move will enable the company to build the infrastructure to support 10 million homes powered by fiber technology with multigigabyte speeds.
Jeffery said the investment in fiber will play a big role in bringing that $3.8 billion to Texas as more consumers buy into the technology. The company recently borrowed $2.1 billion to expand its network, using its Dallas-area fiber-optic system and customers to back the financing.
“We’re building fiber as fast as we can,” Jeffery said. “Customers are willing to pay for that high-speed connectivity. That creates a really bright future for us, for the businesses and the customers who rely on us in Dallas. It also creates the ability for us to continue to invest in new services over time.”
Dallas City Council recently designated Frontier’s office space as an enterprise zone, which will give the company the chance to seek rebates on state sales and use taxes after investing $7 million in its “Gigahub.” Jeffery said the state’s open arms was one of the biggest reasons for the move.
The company is still working on getting more local and state tax incentives, he said.
“Hopefully, we’ll end up with a win-win and something that really helps us invest back in the local community here,” Jeffrey said.
‘Attractive to next-generation digital talent’
Frontier’s Dallas offices have no formal desks or offices and come with an industrial, rustic design and brick walls. Jeffery said he wants to give off the image that Frontier is unlike other telecommunication companies.
“It’s almost the opposite of standard corporate America. We want it to be attractive to next-generation digital talent,” Jeffery said. “If you really want information to flow freely, sometimes formal office structures work against that. To make sure our space is as efficient as it can be, hierarchies are broken down.”
Jeffery said he hopes the company’s unique approach will enable it to come up with innovative ideas.
“This sort of environment will foster rapid innovation,” Jeffery said. “This is a manifestation of the optimism we see in the market and that we see in our company.”
