FTC and several states sue Frontier Communications regarding internet speeds

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.

Re sharing fiber: Yeah, true for me.

I did have Quest DSL in the 90's and loved I could pick my ISP. (Hello Spiretech!)

Worked great, until it didn't and it was always another phone glitching it. Still, for the mid 90's, getting 600kbps in was sweet!

Seems like they were very aggressive about loop distance, not setting realistic expectations.

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.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network

CT Frontier DSL customer here. It's usually 5 Mbps.

Current streaming codecs are impressive though, no problem streaming 720p YouTube.

Hoping to get StarLink soon, just hope the ping isn't horrendous.

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.

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.

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...

I have a lot of friends in WV. They all complain about this company.

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).

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."

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.

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.

While not a certification i think some speed testing apps do show by network.

I must be lucky, I'm currently getting ~100Mpbs higher than the advertised speeds for Fios.

> Doesn't every ISP do this?

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.

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...

I have Frontier Fios (formally Verizon) and I always get over the advertised speeds on the downloads and uploads. I've never had DSL however.

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.

Just wanted to comment that your bot for Twitter is awesome. Do you have the code on Github or anything? I would love to do this for Xfinity.

> 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".

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.

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.

Small claims court? Imagine if every customer filed a claim.

So all surveyed DSL providers are under delivering?

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.

When I canceled my DSL the person on the phone admitted their service was lousy. They just gave up trying to defend crappy service.

Ok but if they lied about what they had the ability to offer, how do you interpret that as "not bad"?

I don't care if they had good customer service, or were working on a shoestring budget. If they sold something they couldn't do, then that's a crime.

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.

Did you work at Frontier?

edit: Asking because it would be cool if you could expand a little bit on the troubles faced by Frontier or similar ISPs, if you have any info there.

> 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.

> yet they expect GbPS for 39.99

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.

https://ilsr.org/fact-sheet-frontier-communications-has-fail...

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.

This could just be pinned down to Frontier using fiber and Spectrum using coax, yes?

West LA is mostly old Verizon Fios infra.

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.

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.

Nice. What's your uplink speed?

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'.

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".

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.

> 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.

FTC is a government agency.