Most people are sharing experiences with Frontier's FiOS/fiber-to-the-home service.
This complaint is about Frontier's decrepit DSL-over-copper service, which is the only service they offer to 80% of their customers, and varies widely based on loop distance (to the central office) and line quality. Very few of these customers get more than 20 Mbps. [1]
Hopefully Ars Technica will have a post about this lawsuit that contains more context.
Story time: Back before 2010 the Australian government established the Next-generation Broadband Network ("NBN") [1]. Almost all of Australia at this point had ADSL as their best Internet option.
Now the ACCC (equivalent to the FTC but with teeth) had created this situation by allowing third parties to put their own DSLAMs in the telephone exchanges. In response, that telco (Telstra) let the landline business languish (after all, why invest in a network that competitors have a right to access?) in favour of 3G (and later LTE), which had no such constraints and was much more profitable.
2-10Mbps was good in 2002. Not so much in 2012.
So the NBN's original mission was to replace all this copper with fiber (FTTH) and was going to cost tens of billions. Each household would be guaranteed 100Mbps.
Construction got off to a slow start and after a few years later not much fiber had been laid. The Labor (left-leaning) government lost an election and was replaced by the Coalition (Liberal-National parties; conservative) who had to be different and proposed a mixed-technology model as a cheaper alternative.
Their model meant for most people they were going to get fiber-to-the-node ("FTTN"). This is the last-mile copper using VDSL1/2 (which only works over short distances) and otherwise fiber.
So for $50B+ each household would only be guaranteed 25Mbps. If this saved any money at all I'd be surprised. But that's what Australia has now. And not everyone gets 25Mbps. By network topology some people aren't within 1.2km of the fiber node.
DSL just shouldn't qualify as broadband (of acceptable speed) in 2021.
In the UK, FTTC (FTTN) with VDSL is very common, but speeds are much higher—-I get 60+ Mbps solidly. Luckier people have G.fast and FTTP, but 60 Mbps is still pretty good.
Here they’ve split the ILEC-equivalent (BT) from the company that is responsible for providing wholesale access to BT and the CLECs and that company owns the physical plant and infrastructure, including last mile (Openreach). BT owns Openreach but it is semi-independent and seems to be heavily regulator-driven to provide as much access to as many people as possible.
Compared to other places I’ve lived, this model seems to be working better than most.
I had Frontier DSL to my rural home in southwest Wisconsin. It was advertised as 6Mbps — I never saw more than 1.5. But far worse than the abysmal bandwidth was the packet loss and signal interruptions. I had a 1400 baud modem as a kid, and I’d prefer it to the service I had from Frontier. Their customer service was lousy, too, of course.
I was very fortunate to find a small local wireless ISP. It’s not fiber to the home, but 10Mbps wireless beats Frontier’s DSL any day.
When I worked for century link briefly their customers barely got above dial-up speeds. In fact many were using dial up (this was probably almost a decade ago)
Line attentuation can be a huge problem because a lot of rural homes are far down dirt roads away from infrastructure.
I always hated the CenturyLink brand. It makes me think of covered wagons: "linking you to Internet access the way your grandpappy liked it."
Story time: I worked at a CLEC in the late 90s, and my entry there was in tech support. People would call in and literally scream at me that they couldn't get better that 26.4Kbps from their dialup even though they lived in a brand new subdivision full of expensive houses, so it was obviously due to our incompetence. I'd patiently explain that rather than running new lines to their new lots, SWB had installed a pair gain, and no modem was going to get decent connections through that beast. The sheer fury these customers would direct at SWB after I told them was an awesome and terrifying thing to behold.
CL here (major coastal city) offers most non apartment complexes symmetric gigabit fiber. They are still running a free install/modem deal too. Pain in the butt to run power for their ONT box but I'm sitting at $65/month flat rate for gigabit with zero downtime since install 3 months ago.
My other option is Comcast but for anything over a 20mb upload speed I'd be paying over $240. Even their fiber doesn't get above 20mb up, last I checked, without reaching a pricier package.
I have Frontier DSL. It was sold to me as 16MBps, but I corrected the salesperson that it is actually 16Mbps. In any case, I get about 12Mbps on a good day. A modem reboot seems to help it speed up for a bit.
I grew up in rural West Virginia and Frontier's DSL offering was (and in most cases) still is (aside from satellite internet with ridiculous throttling limits) the only option for internet connectivity. As a teenager I was always frustrated, and as an adult with a fully remote job, I am still frustrated because I cannot visit my parents for any extended period of time due to the abysmal internet. Not only is the speed exceptionally bad (often between .5 mbps and 1 mbps for paid service of 5mbps) but they have regular outages and issues with the supplied routers and modems.
To top that off, I've heard from my old friends and family, that the lines in some neighborhoods are so overwhelmed by the current load, that they are have begun to turn down new customers because they do not have the infrastructure to support them.
West Virginia and Frontier have a long and troubled history and it seems like it's going to continue for a long time. I can only hope that StarLink is a real and viable solution for people who don't have good internet access.
Your parents might consider Starlink. My mother is in a similar situation. Way out in the countryside with only very slow DSL available. Even the two WISP (Wireless ISP) providers did not have towers in line-of-sight of her property (darn trees).
She got Starlink and now is getting about 80Mbps down and 40Mbps up.
It is a bit pricey at $550 for the unit delivered and $99 a month. But when you don't have any other realistic options...
And it's portable. I take mine camping in the National Forests in Oregon, far away from any sort of cell signal (or data for that matter). I love how fast it is to set up and automatically positions itself to get a signal lock (as opposed to having to manually point it at the right spot like most other satellite tv/internet dishes). I've done a few 4k youtube livestreams with it. Something that would be impossible otherwise without a tv satellite truck.
> I take mine camping in the National Forests in Oregon
How do you do this? Starlink is location-locked at the moment. They're awaiting FCC approval for fully-mobile use, and other people have reported that they can't even get service in a fixed location that's more than a few miles from their registered service address.
> Since at least January 1, 2015, Frontier has in numerous instances advertised, marketed, offered, or sold DSL Internet service at tiers corresponding to speeds that Frontier did not, and often could not, provide to consumers.
Doesn't every ISP do this? Isn't that why we have the wording of "up to n Mbps"?
I have had three ISPs in the past 5 years, and only one of them was able to occasionally deliver the speeds that they advertised for the plan during off-peak hours. I even made a twitter account just to let Verizon know, their reps didn't seem to appreciate it: https://twitter.com/VerizonFiosUser
I mean it's great a lawsuit has been created to address this, and I hope they win. But I also am pessimistic that this will lead to meaningful change for the big ISPs. Frontier might be the lowest hanging fruit to go after, but they are all doing this.
On another note, I could see value in a separate certification process that shows the actual average speed delivered for each plan in a given area.
> Doesn't every ISP do this? Isn't that why we have the wording of "up to n Mbps"?
No. At least in NYC, every provider I've ever had (several) normally achieved the advertised speeds during the daytime mostly, and overnight (e.g. 3 am).
But it might go down 25% or even 50% in the evenings once everyone gets home and starts watching Netflix, at certain times on weekends, etc.
(Obviously COVID has changed these patterns a bit.)
That's always felt generally reasonable to me for residential contracts -- that the capacity is there except during peak residential usage or temporary maintenance.
"Up to" with regard to internet speeds generally means you will reach that capacity at non-peak times.
If you can't regularly achieve max capacity at 3 am, then the advertised speeds are fraudulent. After all, bringing this to its logical conclusion, companies can't advertise "up to infinite speed" even though that's "mathematically true".
There's also some aspect of how close they get to the "up to" speed during the peak times.
One friend that was on Frontier's DSL out in the boonies had a 5Mbps plan. At peak times, he'd be lucky to see 0.2Mbps. (And he'd be lucky to get it up to 1Mbps the rest of the time...)
It's really hard to justify providing 5% of the "up to" speed at peak times as reasonable in any circumstance.
In his case, Frontier's answer was to tell him to upgrade to their ~10Mbps plan if his speed wasn't enough. Never mind that they already weren't delivering what he paid for. After several complaints to the AG's office and other regulators, he eventually was in touch with an engineer that just told him flat out that the node he was on was already oversold by many hundreds of percent and there was just no way he'd ever see any promised speed.
So it wasn't even a case of Frontier thinking they had a realistic chance of ever delivering the speed they had sold and dealing with fluctuations in demand. They very clearly sold a product that they never expected to deliver.
It's perfectly reasonable to see "up to 100 Mbps" (for example) and expect speeds on average approaching that value, not 50 or 10 or even 60 or 70 most of the time.
At best it's misleading. Frontier should adjust the contract and marketing language to reflect its true capabilities. If it can deliver "up to 100 Mbps", but on average/typically can only deliver 50 Mbps, the marketing language and contract should reflect that, e.g., "50 Mbps on average/typically, with bursts up to 100 Mbps possible."
My understanding is that frontier serves mostly rural customers using the POTS infrastructure. They were advertising internet speeds that they were never capable of delivering.
This is indeed correct. While I understand the predicament of being far from the switch reduces speeds, it’s a bit absurd when you’re paying for 12, but can only get 3. (This is not an exaggeration.)
You’re are lucky to even get 3 if you pay for 12. In my (small) hometown most people have frontier so I definitely gathered a little more an anecdotal evidence when working on people’s networks/PCs and it was usually in the kilobytes 1-3 mbps on a good day (usually the lower end.)
At least in my area, most DSL providers derate their offerings based on distance from the DSLAM, so they're transparent about this... e.g. punch addresses in a small town into the CenturyLink website and you will see the offering decay from 15mbps to 3mbps as you get further from the phone exchange. I'm surprised that Frontier wasn't doing the same, or perhaps they were but being far too optimistic in their estimate.
Frontier also serves a bunch of reasonably large cities (for example territory they purchased from AT&T later in life). Where I live, I can get Frontier's "up to 24Mbit/s" service (probably closer to 10 if I'm lucky) or the competitor (cable company) which offers both traditional cable AND a new FiOS service with speeds up to 1 Gigabit. I haven't upgraded yet, and am still on 200 down/35 up but pay a fraction of what Frontier would charge (and I usually get closer to 215 down and 36 up). It's no wonder Frontier declared bankruptcy.
I live at about the maximum ADSL range from my central office and for years suffered with service that was slow and unreliable no matter what.
They put a fiber node just out of VDSL range but I have ADSL with two lines at 18 Mbps/s with an application-level load balancer. Each of those lines performs as rated almost all the time.
In the early 0's Frontier struggled with "middle mile" capacity even for customers who only got 1 Mbps DSL. People would have their service turned off with no explanation in my neighborhood, I had gone all the way up the CEO of the company to get help with one of my lines, the truck was followed by some lady in a car who was desperate to get hers fixed. Even when it worked the 1 Mbps DSL like would give more like 30k.
Eventually they fixed it, but around that time they announced they would implement a miniscule 10 GB monthly data cap which they were forced to suspend indefinitely once the public heard about it.
(I understand that upgrading DSL is a challenge, but there is no excuse for not upgrading the middle mile.)
No. Most ISPs overprovision. e.g. my Spectrum service is nominally 600Mbit but actually supports 680. This is done because a) users often measure payload throughput vs wire throughput and there's a ~10% packet overhead, and b) to avoid customer complaints at the margin.
This is accurate in my experience working for numerous ISPs. Especially with DSL service, lines were often overprovisioned up to 20%.
I also gained a lot of insight into the tools available to support staff and they varied quite a bit. I even worked on a contract with Frontier for a few months. The service they offered for former Verizon FIOS customers was decent, but DSL customers were treated like crap. Unless a customer went out of their way to make multiple contact attempts and demand to escalate multiple times, they would be largely ignored in any situation that required a truck roll. The company truly did not care and it's obvious nothing has changed (Except maybe for the worse) since I worked that contract.
Of the ISPs I worked with I actually found Centurylink to have the best tools and best service. Personally I've been stuck with comcast for most of the last decade so I've never been the customer but the support staff was generally pretty well trained at the time and they had a lot of information available about the line status, as well as direct interface with the CPE. They were in a transition to off-shore support at the time though, and it was clear that the quality of service provided by the off-shore agents was much lower. They were very clearly trained off a tight script and were woefully incapable of handling situations that didn't fit the script.
Overprovision is a different thing. You are talking about getting 680 so that when you speedtest, you have NOTHING to complain about to them. This is basically part of their boost and oversub plan, where it isn’t hurting them so they toss you a bone to preempt speed complaints.
What you aren’t told is that Spectrum also does short term speed boosting. For 30S-1min you’ll get 680, but it will fall in PRIORITY after that. This also conveniently helps speed tests. At 3am, you’ll get a solid 680 real world. At 6pm, you’re more likely to get a sustained 680 for a bit, then fall to 400 or so. You need a transfer at max speed to show this. Newsgroups are good for maxing a connection and showing the fall-off decline of a boosted connection. Spectrum only started this in my area a year ago or so. After an initially great move to DOCSIS 3.1.
Oversubscribing means that if Spectrum has 2TB of bandwidth, they’ll sell 3TB knowing that all their customers won’t concurrently use it. It would be a statistically unlikelihood. TRUST ME, they do the math on this.
If you add all the 600Mbps users up, you’ll get to a number they can not possibly support. This is OK.
What the issue that Frontier seems to be in trouble with is they went way too far, and couldn’t hit the base numbers they were offering.
But YES, every ISP out there I ever felt with while in telecom does in fact oversubscribe.
> It would be a statistically unlikelihood. TRUST ME, they do the math on this.
Is that really how it works?
I was working for a small-town ISP and our approach was: Boss link A is at 50% and will fill up within a month. Shall upgrade the converters?
I mean, you could argue that we did math, i.e., linear prediction on statistical aggregate values, but this was not synced with sales or marketing, rather done out-of-band.
50% of actual usage. We had no integration between NOC and sales, so we had no clue about subscribed throughput. Also, network topology -- e.g. redundant paths -- made the mapping between customers and network pretty tricky.
I'm talking here about access network and core network, not last mile.
It sounds from your other comment it was a smaller ISP you were at. We definitely had the data from NOC and Sales and watched them figure out what hardware they would need for the next few quarters based on their oversubscribe estimations.
Edit: lol; I worked in telecom. I’m sorry first hand experiences make some of you so mad.
Frontier is on another level. Even among their slow speeds, they had a 1.5, 3, or 7mbit plan. They would gladly charge you for the 7mbit plan if you could only get 1.5 and refuse to drop you to the lower plan. I have never in my life dealt with an ISP whose core culture seemed to revolve around lying. From sales to customer support, every time I had a reason to call them I would catch someone lying about something. The only remotely upstanding individuals were the field techs who seemed as disgusted with corporate as most customers were.
Just a data point but no, my ISPs have typically delivered within 5% of the 100- 200mbps plan speed the vast majority of the time, at least as a short burst.
It's impossible to not "over subscribe" in a strict sense unless you have dedicated bandwidth to and through every peering point of your ISP which most "DIA" service doesn't even have let alone consumer service.
It's not really a factor in this question though. The discussion with Frontier is they sold speeds that were impossible to reach, ever, not that the sold speeds you couldn't reach 100% of the time. Most ISPs do not do this, the vast majority will at least hit advertised speeds regularly even if they aren't guaranteed to at any instant.
Totally agree. The issue is Frontier seems to have lied their ass off about speeds that wouldn’t ever be possible over POTS.
And I’ll concede that oversub for DIA is totally different. Surely it’s still possible somewhere but ever less and less likely considering how much larger a 1Gbps fiber pipe is a 56k connection to 15k people at once.
But for actual broadband... I know ISPs over subscribe because I’ve seen it. I’ve been on the calls and in the room when it’s being calculated. Literally everyone does it. Speed boost and overprovisioning are tricks to please customers who are willing to accept “lots of people are online tonight so it’s slow”.
They do, but I have never experienced one as laughably terrible as Frontier. My parents have them and I used to when I lived back home. I’m not exaggerating when I say you would pay for “Up to 12 mbps” and have to endure a few hundred kilobytes most of the time. Not high end either like 2-300 kbps on average. Their customer support is also the worst I’ve ever experienced from anywhere, you call saying you are only getting 2-300 kbps down and they say “you’re in a high volume area” which they said to me even when I lived outside of town with no neighbors. You ask if you can move to a better plan to get faster speeds and they tell you no, you can’t. They also tend to hang up, etc on you but I’ve dealt with that from other companies.
I have a provider here in Switzerland that actually states on their website that 5g is the same as fiber. They offer 10gbits fiber. 10gbits maybe theoretically possible with 5g but fiber will never ever be the same as 5g when you have air/rain/snow/ etc in the line of sight.
I can't even pull 150mbit at full view of the 5g tower with best connection. That's less than 10% of the 2gbits they sold me and 1/5th of what the support told me I can expect.
Meanwhile my cable provider is providing me with 90% of what they sold me which I find acceptable.
I'm now running 15min automated speedtests and hopefully find someplace I can submit this data eventually.
I hate being lied too. If they told me I would get 150mbit I would have been happy.
Sounds like the ISP equivalent of "when everyone is breaking the speed limit all the time police have justification to pull over any individual car they want". I wonder if there's anything behind the scenes that Frontier refused to participate in à la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_of_NSA_surveilla...
Talk to Frontier's DSL customers. This is _not_ what other ISPs are doing.
With Frontier, you're not talking "I pay for 100Mbps and sometimes I only get 80Mbps.".
You're talking "I pay for 5Mbps and I've never seen 5Mbps. The best speed I've ever recorded was 1Mbps, and my connection regularly fluctuates between 0.1 and 0.3 Mbps even during off-peak."
This is a cop accepting that people will do 70mph on a 60mph road, but not 120mph.
It's right there in the contract that you have no expectation to those speeds. You pay for the chance to receive service, not a guarantee of service. One of my ISP options doesn't even attempt to specify bandwidth for upload.
What comparison does this possibly have to law enforcement.
Whatever’s in the contract does not matter for a false advertising claim.
You cannot advertise 12, then sign a contract that says 12 on the front, but has “go fuck yourself, you won’t ever see 12 in your life on this plan”. That’s false advertising.
If you do that, you run a real risk of finding yourself the subject of a lawsuit filed by the United States Federal Government, and potentially state Attorneys General
Their solution when you complain about your 5Mbps plan only providing a few hundred kilobits is to tell you to upgrade to a 12Mbps plan. Which, as confirmed by an engineer, was not going to be any faster as the node was already several hundred percent oversubscribed.
You can put whatever you want in a contract, but the law isn't a dumb computer mechanically executing instructions. It's pretty obvious when you are willing to charge people twice as much for "up to" twice the speed while providing an identical service that you are not presenting your products accurately.
> What comparison does this possibly have to law enforcement.
The comment I replied to literally said "Sounds like the ISP equivalent of 'when everyone is breaking the speed limit all the time police have justification to pull over any individual car they want'". It was the first line. If a comment seems confusing in context, it might help to _read_ the context.
>The comment I replied to literally said "Sounds like the ISP equivalent of 'when everyone is breaking the speed limit all the time police have justification to pull over any individual car they want'". It was the first line. If a comment seems confusing in context, it might help to _read_ the context.
Oh no, it isn't confusing at all. You encouraged a spurious comparison to a baseless allegation. There is no parallel to law enforcement, whatsoever.
No, you really aren’t understanding just how ridiculously terrible frontier as an ISP is. I’ve lived all over America and I would choose Comcast or Mediacom over frontier in a heart beat. It’s more like when everyone’s a thief they are arresting the dude who steals way more than anyone else and does so in such a brash way that he thinks the law doesn’t apply to him.
DSL is highly susceptible to issues with the physical connection. Somewhere in your neighborhood or apartment building is a stack of splitters and you can greatly improve your service if you can convince a technician to put your connection at the top. Customers at the bottom just have chronic signal noise and speed issues as their everyday experience and it isn't a solvable problem.
I'm sorry, what?! xDSL does not have splitters, except the only one in your household that splits the POTS frequencies for the phone and the rest is passed off to the modem. And of course your physical twisted pair wire goes from your modem to the port on the DSLAM in the central office. This is not like cable or xPON, the last mile twisted pair is yours alone.
For cable, probably, since those are shared lines. For DSL or dedicated fiber lines, I’ve never had the paid-for speed not actually get hit on a regular basis (with the obvious exception that your ISP should be honest with you about your distance from the telco).
With DSL, it is trivial to see which speed is assigned to you and which speed is the maximum possible on your line. If your measured speed is lower than your "Actual bitrate" as shown by the modem, something must've gone terribly wrong. If however your plan speed ("on paper") is much higher than what is attainable by the modem, that is a fact of physics and you have to downgrade the plan. You cannot oversell DSL, if it says attainable rate is 10240/1024 Kbps, you cannot sell 15360/1536. The modem will literally be unable to connect at that speed.
The DSL line could be fine but there could be congestion elsewhere in the network. I wouldn't be surprised if Frontier was doing all of the above and they knew they were doing it.
I got Frontier after moving into a house with no internet in upstate New York ("Upstate" being 100 Mi north of NYC). I ordered the 20Mbit plan and after missing and having to call to reschedule 3 installs (w/ 12 hour windows), the first words out of the installers mouth was "you got scammed". Indeed our signal was so weak we were only able to sustain about 0.5kbps. They wanted $75/mo for this and made it as hard as possible to cancel.
The basic history of Frontier in my area is that they bought up all of Verizon's old copper lines and have done exactly nothing to improve the capability. They don't even know what the capabilities ARE. Areas are either oversubscribed or so far from nodes that the signal is worthless. They're trying to squeeze every last cent out of rural houses with no other options and letting the underlying infrastructure slowly fail.
I ended up using a pretty performant (~50Mbit) LTE connection, hacked AT&T hotspot and yagi antenna for 2 years. Finally, as part of a rural broadband grant program New York State got Altice to come in-- probably in exchange for a monopoly in a more attractive part of the state. Now I have 300Mbit cable for $100/mo. Altice (aka Optimum) is also a terrible company, but Frontier still sends me postcards claiming to be "the best internet in <my town>".
These guys are selling a product that doesn't work. They deserve to be sued and I'm disappointed that New York State isn't involved.
One of the best things the FCC did in the last decade has been the Measuring Broadband America program that named and shamed ISPs for not providing advertised speeds. For years Frontier was providing only ~75% of the speed that customers paid for. https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broad... (Chart 4 is my favorite)
Eh, my modem syncs at the full 20 Mbps line rate for upload, I can't help that some of that gets eaten up in overhead for framing and error correction and other such things. You usually don't even get a full 1 Gbps with gigabit fiber either.
I'm so glad the current FTC (and the end of Ajit Pai's to a lesser extent) to audit these DSL companies who claim their DSL connections offer reliable broadband. My DSL was so bad I had to use cellular to reliably connect to video calls.
In the UK not US, but same situation, DSL keeps getting worse wherever I move, last move it was unusable (<2Mbit), with no fiber available, so mobile was the only viable option for modern web use.
Mobile internet can be a bit variable depending on time of day and the provider, but still way better than DSL for me, I get anywhere from 15 to 100Mbit throughout the day, although this level of stability was only achievable using a Cat20 LTE router (Netgear Nighthawk M2 with a couple small external antennas). They probably seem a bit expensive but it's worth the investment, not only for throughput stability but reducing packet loss.
Just don't ever buy mobile contracts for this stuff, at least not before trying out a PAYG sim, you need empirical testing to find out which provider is viable. I attempted to use open cell maps to figure out which provider would give best carrier aggregation in theory, but you don't always connect to the masts you expect, and even then it's reliant on back-haul availability and subscriber contention ratio anyway. In the UK a couple of the main mobile networks have unlimited 1month rolling contracts under different brand names now... so real competition is now possible!
This is the Federal Trade Commission, which occasionally does investigate things like false advertisement, not the Federal Communications Commission (which Ajit Pai ran) which has consistently backed provider and ISP interests over customer interests for a long time.
Frontier doesn't invest in maintaining its wires. They just pocket the money and let it all rot. I had their service years ago in their home base of Rochester before they went on their expansion spree and could only get 4Mb. Water in the line forced me to a new pair that could only get 2Mb. They wouldn't make any effort to fix the issue.
I had Frontier when they took over for Verizon FiOS in the south a number of years ago. Customer service was a nightmare and frequent service interruptions was the norm. I went back to the local cable company for two years. I've given them another shot after they offered an insane deal on gigabit, but I've not once clocked gigabit speeds on a hard line with my gigabit-capable nighthawk, nor Frontier's own router. I'm not going to complain about a missing 150mb/s because it's a hell of a deal still, but I would think this claim that they're misrepresenting speeds goes beyond their DSL customers based on my own experience.
I had Frontier (originally Verizon) DSL up until 2014 when it became obvious that the network was turning into crap, which finally led me to switch to Charter. This story doesn't surprise me at all.
Luckily, in my region Frontier was sold to Ziply last year, who immediately started investing in ditching the old copper wires and now they offer symmetrical gigabit fiber here, so I switched back and have never been happier.
Frontier has been bad company, not because the management or employees were being malevolent. This is truly a case of Occams razor, this is simply a company struggling with finances.
Mini Rant:
They went through bankruptcy, struggling to make ends meet, no bonuses, so all good employees left within first few years, no investors wanting to risk with installing or maintaining physical cable, and people, especially in this forum with hatred of ISP's, have no idea how expensive it is to maintain cable lines to every house in US, yet they expect GbPS for 39.99. 39.99 doesn't even cover truck costs for 5 years when somebody drives over or cuts fiber line on the street or digs to plant a tree, forget about any profit or return for the company.
Frontier said it in their own bankruptcy statement. When it came time to pick a technology to champion, they chose DSL, a decision that did not stand the test of time. You know what's more expensive than having to run infra to every home? Having to run it twice because your first choice didn't cut it.
Infrastructure is an investment. You deploy infrastructure and then have customers pay for it over the next decade. Unfortunately, Frontier has the highest customer churn in the industry so the cash flow is really not great. Their challenge is to figure out how to execute that 2nd investment even though the first one never paid off. Over the past few months they completed their bankruptcy and shed a ton of debt, so they may actually be able to pull it off.
Simultaneously, there are new challengers in the field like Google Fiber, ImOn, MetroNet, and municipal initiatives who are all making their first investment with fiber... and they all offer pretty good pricing.
Frontier isn't an evil company because of their financial issues. They are evil becuase their response to those financial pressures is consistently lieing to their customers.
In the recent past, when Frontier had extra cash, they used it to offer extra dividends to stock holders rather than building infrastructure.
> have no idea how expensive it is to maintain cable lines to every house in US, yet they expect GbPS for 39.99. 39.99 doesn't even cover truck costs for 5 years when somebody drives over or cuts fiber line on the street or digs to plant a tree, forget about any profit or return for the company.
I'm not sure I understand what you are saying. Surely you understand that it's 39.99 a /month/ and a cut cable normally affects more than 1 household (so it's 39.99 times households affected). Also, it seems like you are conveniently leaving out the billions that the US government have given to ISPs to improve/build their networks. Bad/failing ISPs have no one to blame but themselves. I don't hate all ISPs but I do hate the ones that are scummy (which the big players all are). I gladly pay ~$100/mo to MetroNet for gigabit, they are about as no-nonsense as you can get in my book.
Which part of them declaring bankruptcy, no bonuses, not able to hire quality replacements (due to salary) makes you think Frontier is bad?, What exactly do you think is bad about Frontier specifically, exact details?, not abstract faults. Do you think somebody at Frontier stole the bIlLIONs of US gov money and bought yachts?
This hand waving and calling companies "bad" because they failed financially while at the same time complaining about monthly fee or speed or support is oxymoronic.
Try this as a experiment, call a local insured commercial digging company and get quote to lay cable from alley to garage under the driveway/pavement WITHOUT damaging it or any other utility lines and restore all plants/grass/sprinklers after they are done. Ask them quote for the neighborhood, oh if there is any HOA get some lawyers to play HOA politics and write up documents to convince HOA to allow digging/construction.
Now try to make that money back at average rate of $40/month while maintaining those lines, paying electric company for renting/sharing the posts/properties.
>I gladly pay ~$100/mo to MetroNet for gigabit, they are about as no-nonsense as you can get in my book.
You is NOT everybody on the street, not even remotely are people willing to pay $60/month for gigabit, even if you lay gigabit line, people in general are only wanting to pay $39.99 or $49.99 and get 50 or 100Mbps.
Have you ever paid for internet in the US? GbPS is more like $80+ first of all (especially with fees), second both federal and state governments have given Frontier alone nearly $2 BILLION dollars to get their network up to snuff.
I have seen the internals of Frontier communications, and the area I saw, was completely run by consulting companies, that were all competing with each other not over contracts, but over which parts of Frontier's corporate hierarchy they had ownership of. It was normal for employees of the various consulting groups to jokingly compare which group was doing the most aggressive job to overcharge frontier comm. I have never stood in one location, and seen so many consulting groups managing so many people, doing so little productive work.
I am not surprised to learn they have had financial problems.
>> yet they expect GbPS for 39.99. 39.99 doesn't even cover truck costs for 5 years when somebody drives over or cuts fiber line on the street or digs to plant a tree, forget about any profit or return for the company.
Is there anything technical preventing companies from offering dedicated speeds and lines at a premium at residential neighborhoods other than pure economics?
I pay 600CZK (~30USD) for a 1000/60 DOCSIS Internet connection (with a public IPv4 IP!) in the Czech Republic. Granted, it's to a flat in a city, not an isolated house in the suburbs, but I'm pretty sure Vodafone's rates are flat.
I'm not doing that at all - his comment made it sound like he worked for an ISP. To me, hearing from someone who works at an ISP or even the ISP in question could add valuable context to the discussion. I'll edit my comment to make that more clear.
Side note - it's funny, in a wry way, that my question can be simultaneously asked in (what felt to me like) such an innocent way and interpreted in such a malevolent way when you view it through the lens of "standard HN snark".
Is this the same Frontier given a pass by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and received " $283.4 million each year from the FCC's Connect America Fund (CAF)...financed by phone customers nationwide through universal service fees"?
If so, I think phone users will have an interest in justice.
I tried both Spectrum and Frontier at 1Gbit/s. I'm in Santa Monica. Only one example but:
Frontier was so much better than Spectrum — pings to 8.8.8.8 are consistently 6-8ms, compared to Spectrum at 10-30ms. And Frontier download speeds are 500Mbps-800Mbps, significantly higher than Spectrum.
The installation was also more competent and organized.
I'd guess there's lots of regional variation though.
Long Beach here using gigabit Frontier and it's been great. Easily the best home internet service I've ever had.
I plug my Google WiFi (yes I work at Google) directly into the modem and ignore the router they gave me entirely. It's real nice not having to deal with that huge box.
Leaving Frontier DSL once we got cable (not even fiber, just cable!) a couple years back was so freeing.
One thing that was unexpectedly bad was their routing. It was just atrocious. Playing any online game would see ping constantly jump between 50 to 180 ms as their network did... whatever the fuck it wanted to do. I had to use a VPN while gaming just to get a stable ping. Getting the packets out of frontier's network ASAP was the most important thing to have a usable experience. I've never seen anything like it before or since.
I used to have Frontier for my Internet. The speeds were acceptable for my day to day until the local schools got out for summer. Then the network was saturated and I couldn't get fast enough speeds to do my job.
I tried to trace where the issue was. My best guess was the issue had to do with their uplink to the rest of the Internet. At times in the day it would get saturated because they didn't provide enough bandwidth at that point. There was a bottleneck.
I have Frontier gigabit fiber and I have zero complaints.
At the peak of Zoom school, I had 3 kids on zoom calls, my wife and I both on zoom calls, and the 2 year old watching Netflix all at the same time without even a blip.
I'm 90% certain the gigabit download isn't that important, but synchronous upload and download speeds that make all the difference.
It may depend on where you are. gigabit speeds and fiber aren't available in my region. The places that have it are not routed to the upstream providers the same way my region is.
ISPs that have many locations around the US are routed differently to the broader Internet and can have different footprints in different locations.
Pro Tip: If you live in rural areas with bad internet, check out T-Mobile’s 5G internet: https://www.t-mobile.com/isp
I’m not affiliated with the company, but I am a customer. We switched from Frontier to T-mobile and went from 5mbps to 150mbps for about the same monthly rate, $50/mo.
Absolutely horrible ISP by any standard. Happy to see the government go after them - in many places they were a monopoly so you had no choice but to put up with profoundly sub-par service, to the point that it could interfere in day-to-day tasks like exchanging emails, uploading class assignments, etc.
They called my 7Mbps DSL "High-Speed Internet". And it was only that "fast" because we had two phone lines. Now I have Spectrum and get 200Mbps. A lot of people around hate Spectrum but it's been fine for me so far.
This might be regional. I had frontier in the Seattle area and it was rock solid. Fast and never went down. It was later renamed to ziply and it's just as good, the best internet I've had so far.
The city of Seattle in _specific_ is an exception. The regulatory agencies in that specific, highly desirable, region had a strong initiative and provided accurate maps of areas of the city served by providers with 21st century gitabit (download) speeds at least the better part of a decade ago.
I distinctly recall that at the time I was looking to rent somewhere less pricy and literally crossing outside of the city lines relegated someone to living in 'the internet ghetto' of ADSL at 7mbit down and less than one up if you were lucky, or cable with outrageous rates and gigabit deploying years after it became available in the city of Seattle. There were a couple expensive apartment complexes served by Wave broadband, which had acquired an earlier company, 'condo internet'.
Let me know when someone's ready to take on the Regional Sports Fees. Every telecom participates, and I have to pay $7 a month to the Chicago Cubs because every cable provider in the state says I do.
What gets really fun is when you are in the blackout zone, but not in the TV zone.
I live about 50 miles from Seattle. 120 from Portland. My TV is Seattle-based.
Basketball games for the Portland Trail Blazers are unwatchable, even with League Pass, because I cheerfully get told the game is blacked out and to "watch on my local Portland channel".
Frontier has advertised different tiers of speeds to consumers, including an August 2018 mailer that offered download speeds of 12 Megabits per second for $12, the complaint said. Assholes.
A neighbor has slowish DSL from AT&T. Not only is there not much bandwidth, but latency is also much higher than cable, making everything feel very slow.
The Verizon router won't support wireless speeds over 200 mbps, you need to connect the router to your device through Ethernet. I went through this same song and dance with Verizon.
Prior to that, I was on Frontier who took over Verizon fiber, which was setup at my house, but unused due to their insistence I pay a very unreasonable setup fee. Was $600, and no way. It was up, ready, nothing needed. Pretty sure they did a free move deal for the people who lived there prior thinking they would get money from me too. Nope.
I used a 3G dongle for about a year standoff with Verizon. Also had a Moto droid with Verizon unlimited running the house for a few months too. Was a work phone with that great plan baked in.
Frontier waived all that and I bought TV plus Internet. (Fam wanted TV)
Frankly, I loved Frontier!
Tried to setup auto pay and it would break. This happened a few times, so I left it broken figuring someone would call and we could sort it out then.
8 months go by, and service stops.
I call, expecting a big bill and terms.
The service woman and I had a chat about the back end mess and it was truly spectacular. I asked her why she worked there and she said the crew was the best, systems not so much. Fair enough.
It was broken, but they laughed a lot. Love that!
Anyway, she said it would be easier if I were a new customer. No big bill, no terms, just start over. And new customers get a free year of Amazon Prime.
I asked her is she serious? Answered yes and this spoke to why they laughed a lot. The system was broken, but they had wide latitude to take care of people because it was broken enough the higher ups rarely could sort it out otherwise!
She was a hoot! Great chat while she got me all setup on the new system, autopay working just fine.
TL;DR: Payment system failed and I was shut off for non payment and got free Prime and better service for less money despite being 8 months over due!
Other than that, I love an ISP I never hear from, unless I really need to. Never heard from Frontier. And it worked just great. Seriously fast, basically no downtime.
The only negative is the old Verizon fiber interface and its pain in the ass battery. I finally just wired a power supply to the battery so it would shut up and I no longer change batteries.
I do not hear from Ziply today either, and it works great, and cost makes great sense for everyone.
> Tried to setup auto pay and it would break. This happened a few times, so I left it broken figuring someone would call and we could sort it out then.
Never do this in the US. You need to proactively call them to resolve the situation. The standard thing for nonpayment -- which maybe Frontier didn't have working, but you're taking a real risk -- is for these to go to a collections agency, and it will go on your credit record, which affects your future ability to get credit for large loans of various kinds.
Having credit destroyed and basically trading my home for my wife due to both her getting colon problems, and an employer who thought a trip to Spain mattered more than insuring people all left me in a zero fucks to give position at that time, so I let it play out. Unwise? Inadvisable? Yup. :D
(We really do need significant health care reform here, just saying. Mid 6 figure events are no joke)
There were some prior calls too. All initiated by me. Do this, do that, oh you want paperless billing? Sure! And on it goes.
My guess is Frontier is going to end up a private company when they come out of bankruptcy, just like their doppelganger Windstream did. I also expect there will end up being a merger between those two or one of them and Lumen (CenturyLink). These primarily rural ISPs all have the same difficulties in maintaining and upgrading service in their low density coverage areas.
I'm not sure if merging is the answer for them to succeed, but the talk in this space has been very much in that direction. What remains to be seen is how much of an impact Starlink will have on their customers. In a way in might be helpful, allowing them to rid themselves of their most expensive to service customers. But if Starlink becomes popular in small towns rather than just rural areas, that could eat into the easier to service and profit from customer base of these companies.
This complaint is about Frontier's decrepit DSL-over-copper service, which is the only service they offer to 80% of their customers, and varies widely based on loop distance (to the central office) and line quality. Very few of these customers get more than 20 Mbps. [1]
Hopefully Ars Technica will have a post about this lawsuit that contains more context.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/front...