Growing Retail · One-Stop Connectivity
Opening new stores faster than the IT team could grow.
How a fast-growing Canadian retailer handed its entire connectivity stack to one partner, so a small head-office IT team could focus on the business instead of the network.
Growth is the part of retail that looks good in a pitch deck and is genuinely hard in practice. Every new store is a lease, a build-out, a hiring plan, a launch date. Behind all of that, quieter and less visible, is the network: broadband, backup, voice, in-store music, the router on the wall. None of it is interesting until it does not work.
For a fast-growing Canadian retailer with a small head-office IT team, that quiet pile of work had started to add up.
01 The customer
A multi-site retailer in a growth phase, opening new locations across Canada. The head-office IT team is small, sharp, and stretched. Their job is to support an entire business, not to coordinate carriers and field technicians for every new store opening.
As they planned the next wave of locations, the math stopped working. Adding stores meant adding vendors, contracts, install coordination, and bills. Connectivity was turning into a second job for a team that already had one.
In their own words
I don't have the time or resources to coordinate all the vendors on my own.
IT Manager, multi-site retailer
02 The cost of doing it themselves
That sentence describes the real problem behind most growing multi-site businesses. The team can handle ten stores by force of will. At twenty, the cracks show. Every new location needs a different carrier in a different region, a different install crew, a different invoice. Nobody is responsible for the network as a whole. The IT lead is the integration layer, and the integration layer is one person with a full inbox.
They did not need a better carrier. They needed someone to run that whole part of the business for them.
03 What Frontier built
Frontier became the one-stop shop for connectivity across every location, current and future. One vendor. One bill. One number to call. No finger-pointing between providers when something needs fixing.
Broadband with backup
Primary broadband with a secondary connection, so a single circuit failure does not take a store offline.
Managed SD-WAN
Circuit bonding, end-to-end encryption, and full visibility through Frontier's management tools.
TrueVoice and music
Canadian-hosted cloud PBX for in-store voice, plus in-store music through the same partner.
Dispatch, no charges
Field technician dispatch handled by Frontier, with no field service charges holding up an opening.
The setup was deliberately simple. The customer's IT lead approves the order. Frontier handles the rest: circuit ordering, equipment staging, install scheduling, day-one support. The thing that used to be a second job stops being a job at all.
04 How it actually went
Frontier started with two locations. That was deliberate. A small pilot let both sides confirm the process worked end to end, from order to live, before committing to the full estate.
Once the pilot was clean, the customer handed over the rest. The whole estate moved onto Frontier inside a single growth wave, and new stores now come online on Frontier from the moment they open.
Not every part was frictionless. The specific in-store hardware the customer preferred was on a long backorder, and that slowed individual store openings. The work-around was a Frontier project team that scheduled around the supply situation site by site, rather than trying to force a single launch date. The openings happened. They just happened on a rhythm dictated by hardware availability rather than ambition.
one invoice across the estate, in place of bills spread across vendors
05 The outcome
The integration layer is gone. In its place is one partner, one bill, and a small IT team that gets to spend its time on the business instead of on the network.
Some figures are directional estimates rather than audited measurements.
Growing fast and tired of coordinating carriers?
This story is the pattern for a growing multi-site retailer with a thin head-office IT team, opening locations faster than their carrier setup can keep up with. A few dozen stores or growing toward that, ambitions for many more, and a leader who already knows the bottleneck is vendor coordination, not network technology.
Frontier exists to take that whole layer off their desk. One vendor, one bill, one team that runs the connectivity side of the business so the customer can run the business.
