The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the companies were in advanced talks. Frontier, cobbled together by several deals over the years, has more than 2 million fiber-optic connections across 25 states. Folding its network into Verizon would reach a combined 10 million fiber-optic customers in the Northeast and Midwest as well as in California, Texas and Florida—three markets that Verizon sold to Frontier in 2016.