On July 1, 2010, Verizon customers in 14 states, became customers of Frontier Communications. Frontier bought the customers and their landline phone service accounts from Verizon for around 5.3 billion dollars. I have absolutly no idea why someone would want to buy landline customers, when everyone and their dog is switching to either voice over IP phone service, cell phone service, or a combination of the two.

Qwest was complaining a couple of months ago, that they were losing like 3 percent of their landline customers every month in New Mexico, and the trend was the same in their other 13 states. with that kind of customer loss, I don’t understand why a company would chose to buy landline customers. (OK, there is one reason, and that is because the US government, through the FCC’s PIC Fee program, is still paying rural phone companies to provide phone service . And the money isn’t a paltry sum. Last year there was one place in Washington state where the Feds paid a company like $600,000 to provide service to less than 30 houses.)

If any of you have any thoughts on this, drop a comment with links and lets see if we can figure this out.