My apologies, it hit me at a bad time and I read way into it. Sincerely, I am sorry.
Onto other items at hand. I was a National Account Manager w/ Frontier for 2 years selling primarily data connectivity and voice. They completed their Frame Relay network just a few months ago but I didn't sell their frame product as I didn't want to beta test the new network on my clients. They actually had been selling frame in the Northeast for about the past 4 years but just recently completed extending their Cascade frame network to the rest of the country. Their frame network is truly state of art utilizing all Cascade switches.
I left on excellent terms with the door wide open should I ever want to go back. The principal reason I left is that telecommunications is rapidly moving toward computer telephony and like all carriers they are losing some of their greatest profit margin -long distance minutes- to the internet and LAN/WAN voice over applications.
These areas will continue to grow at an accelerated rate. I didn't want to get caught with outdated telephony knowledge. I also wanted to move into designing LAN/WAN applications with the ability to sell the associated hardware. In addition, in my opinion the Internet will continue to grow and more and more electronic commerce will be done over this medium.
So, those were my principal reasons...selfish. Frontier and the other major carriers are moving more toward this understanding but are generally a long ways off from taking advantage of this market (this includes MCI/WorldCom although they are ahead of the rest of the pack).
Nevertheless, Frontier is a good company and on the verge of being an excellent one. They have had a lot of crappy corporate culture and baggage to dump with the acquisition of Allnet 2 1/2 years ago. This was a major undertaking and is still going on.
I mentioned the new CEO and new President of Sales. They truly are exceptionally qualified good people and if they don't turn the corner for this company they will actively shop the company to the (R)BOC's. For a few reasons which I could go into later, I believe a solid acquisition price would be high $30's and possibly even $40 per share. If they turn the corner and then go shopping the company, I think were looking at upper $40's. Clayton has stated this as well.
Also keep in mind that their new SONET network positions them well for the next generation of telephony (ATM, video, ADSL/XDSL,Internet, etc). Quest and it's partners will have the most sophisticated network in the world when completed later this year and the cost of transmission will be lower than any of their competitors (GTE & MCI/WorldCom also own a chuck of this new network). Frontier believes in this network as they put $500,000,000 into this build.
Frontier is nearly a $3 Billion company. They have an excellent billing platform. They have very little debt. An (R)BOC that wants to enter the LD arena could easily intergrate Frontier into their organization immediately adding revenue and a beautiful new SONET network.
Hey, I gotta' get back to making a living. I'll post some more thoughts on this line later.
Sal
ps. 40% of my 401k is in Frontier stock at a cost average of about $19. |
