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Comment by mrpippy | Hacker News Reader

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.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/front...

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Interesting tidbit: Apparently ~2% of households with internet still used dial-up as of November 2019.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/185532/us-household-dial...

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.

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