Frontier capped actual DSL speeds to levels below its advertised rates, FTC says.
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Frontier knowingly sold Internet speeds it can’t deliver, FTC lawsuit says
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next they should take a look at Verizon. I have been given the 'high speed internet' of 1mpg for my dsl. Frankly it rarely gets above .5 and the highest I have seen is .8
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It gets worse when, as my co-worker used to say, one of the 1s or 0s "gets stuck sideways".
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I don't use Frontier, but
wouldn't it be fun to try to send in a payment :
"up to" the billed amount. 25% promised speed = 25% payment.
wouldn't it be fun to try to send in a payment :
"up to" the billed amount. 25% promised speed = 25% payment.
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30 percent of roughly 4 million since 2015 every month were not given the service they expected. Is this about correct, or is there a missing factor here?
It cant help but be noticed these companies consistently lie to every level of our nation for profit. Cant wait for starlink, but I have to think that to the extent people will gladly move away from them in droves it will lead to more consolidation for terrestrial ISPs. Hopefully more accountability will be forced in the near future, and municipal internet becomes normalized.
It cant help but be noticed these companies consistently lie to every level of our nation for profit. Cant wait for starlink, but I have to think that to the extent people will gladly move away from them in droves it will lead to more consolidation for terrestrial ISPs. Hopefully more accountability will be forced in the near future, and municipal internet becomes normalized.
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It's no wonder that ISPs rank near the top of many customer dissatisfaction surveys. They have become the 21st century's used car lots.
If ever an industry has written its own case for regulation, this could be it.
If ever an industry has written its own case for regulation, this could be it.
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When I moved, Frontier said I could get "up to 6 MBit" at the new address.
When the installer left my DSL was set to 1.5M down / 512K up.
I lived right around 1/4 mile from the terminal so by simple SNR calculations I should be getting ADSL2 speeds around 20/2. I called them up and had them (re) dispatch a tech. They set it to 3M/768k but said that's as high as the system would allow them to go.
Later I got fed up with it, and ordered a second line to do load balancing and again got provisioned to 3M/768k, but as time went on it would get slower and slower during peak times, sometimes getting as little as 100Kbit/s on speedtest sites.
I found out later through the grapevine that the terminal down the road had 48 DSL lines on it (two of them were mine), all 48 ports were full, and the terminal itself was only fed by a bundle of 8 T1s (1.5 Mbit/s each), so that box that had 144 Mbit/s worth of downstream provisioning applied to it, only had 12MBit/s available to it.
I complained and complained, but nothing ever came of it in the 5 years I lived there. They were happily taking $50/mo from each of those 48 people though.
If they had actually given me the "6 Mbit/s" they advertised, it would have been half the capacity of the terminal that 47 other customers had to share. There's no way that's not false advertising.
When the installer left my DSL was set to 1.5M down / 512K up.
I lived right around 1/4 mile from the terminal so by simple SNR calculations I should be getting ADSL2 speeds around 20/2. I called them up and had them (re) dispatch a tech. They set it to 3M/768k but said that's as high as the system would allow them to go.
Later I got fed up with it, and ordered a second line to do load balancing and again got provisioned to 3M/768k, but as time went on it would get slower and slower during peak times, sometimes getting as little as 100Kbit/s on speedtest sites.
I found out later through the grapevine that the terminal down the road had 48 DSL lines on it (two of them were mine), all 48 ports were full, and the terminal itself was only fed by a bundle of 8 T1s (1.5 Mbit/s each), so that box that had 144 Mbit/s worth of downstream provisioning applied to it, only had 12MBit/s available to it.
I complained and complained, but nothing ever came of it in the 5 years I lived there. They were happily taking $50/mo from each of those 48 people though.
If they had actually given me the "6 Mbit/s" they advertised, it would have been half the capacity of the terminal that 47 other customers had to share. There's no way that's not false advertising.
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That's what I had with Frontier. The most frustrating problem with that is that there was a hub probably less than a mile from my house but my phone line was on a totally different run off to a hub miles away. I finally paid out the nose for comcast to run cable to my house 3 telephone poles away which suuuuucked but now I have gig internet so I suppose it was worth it to some degree. Had I still been on Frontier this wfh arrangement due to the pandemic would have been utterly brutal. It took 4 months for me to finally get an engineer on the line from Frontier to get them to come out and lower their trash line on those three poles too. Awful experience dealing with them.
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Nationalize these shitheel ISPs, treat Internet access as necessary to functioning in modern society as running water and indoor plumbing, and get rid of these disingenuous scumbags. This goes double considering Pandora's Box known as Work From Home has been opened and, despite all the pointy haired gremlin bosses out there who want people like me back into the waking nightmare known as open offices, working remotely is here to stay unless the economy goes up in a mushroom cloud. And that's just one reason why, to say nothing of streaming media, remote learning, games, etc.
Numerous places I looked at here in NYC were written off from being considered further due to no FIOS when I moved a few months ago. I stand by my decision without hesitation.
Numerous places I looked at here in NYC were written off from being considered further due to no FIOS when I moved a few months ago. I stand by my decision without hesitation.
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Great. Now how about a suit regarding the microwave towers it knowingly oversold?
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This should be included in a possible infrastructure bill. No part of the nation should suffer 1.5 Mbps speeds as download speeds. Not even 6 is acceptable. 50-75 down should be a minimum across the nation. ISPs should not want tens of thousands of dollars to run cable to your home if you're not too far from a connection point.
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There are already a number of municipal ISPs that are very well run. Believe it or not, .gov does some things very well.
The problem is that there isn't any effective trigger for nationalization or municipal incorporation. The big ISPs already have eye-watering levels of corruption that no government is willing to take on and legislators just sit there, smile, wave, and take another contribution from the ISPs.
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All those things the gov needs to do are subjectively enforced due to lobbying power. Nationalization of ISP infrastructure has many proven examples in the world proving viability. While gov screws things up, its still the best way of getting monopoly fingers out of the pie, and corps screw things up as well.
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The best insurance I've ever had has been NY State Medicaid when between jobs. Find a doctor who accepts it, go get what I need, done. No surprise bills, no fee processing fees, nothing. When I'm working, I pay taxes to fund this and numerous other services here in NY State. Works out quite well.
This "government will fuck everything up!" right wing talking point bullshit is so alien and foreign to me, given how it's not what I've experienced at all, it's like showing the Heptapods' language from Arrival to a Roman legionnaire. You do realize said talking point's purpose is to try and further gut the government, privatize it, and let their donors and friends' companies run everything and further suck everyone dry, right?
To put it another way, death panels have existed for quite some time. But they work at the insurance companies, they are why insulin prices have gone up 1000% over 20ish years, and so forth.
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Is it better to sell internet speeds you can't deliver or ones you won't deliver?
ISPs should only be able to advertise minimum guaranteed speed, not maximum possible theoretical speed.
Meh. ISPs should all be nationalized.
ISPs should only be able to advertise minimum guaranteed speed, not maximum possible theoretical speed.
Meh. ISPs should all be nationalized.
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AmanoJyaku
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
You expect the government to screw up an ISP, yet you trust them to monitor, audit, and punish the ISP? Why do you think the government can do one thing, but not the other?
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I don't see why we (as a nation) can't do both. Nationalize and penalize them as-is. Possibly both at the same time. It might give the FCC some teeth in the process, I'm sure.
Take away their toys (and their lives with prison terms or reparations), and also nationalize the ISP they 'built' on the backs of taxpayer money, subsidies or not.
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LoL It's not in spec, but it's still more than good enough for the speeds Frontier is pushing.
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They'll just settle the lawsuit for a fine that's a fraction of the actual profits garnered from the scam.
Business as usual.
Business as usual.
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They're all for internet 'fast lanes' so they can charge more based on media type, but they're sternly against people paying for what they get or even use.
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I work for an ISP that does business with Frontier. They rival the worst of them and the horror stories for customer speeds, tech visits, CO help are pretty much true.
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The other day I read the story of a small cooperative bringing fibre to the smallest villages and towns in the Segovia province(central Spain). They plan to deploy fibre to 119 villages/towns with a total population of around 10000.
The cooperative will deploy the fibre, the electricity TSO will lend dark fibre to connect them the infrastructure owned by another cooperative (a Wireless Community Network). This month they started with 3 villages totalling less than 200 people.
This is a picture of Navares de las Cuevas, a village of 25 people that now has access to gigabit fibre:
The cooperative will deploy the fibre, the electricity TSO will lend dark fibre to connect them the infrastructure owned by another cooperative (a Wireless Community Network). This month they started with 3 villages totalling less than 200 people.
This is a picture of Navares de las Cuevas, a village of 25 people that now has access to gigabit fibre:
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They could guarantee a minimum speed within their network, but building out a network without overprovisioning uplinks would cost a fortune. Even within a LAN, uplinks from the access switches to the core are commonly overprovisioned 10:1 or more.
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WOW has been doing this to me for years in Illinois. I have detailed records of demonstrating that they cannot deliver the advertised speeds and that even detailed troubleshooting won't fix. I have a long support conversation walking them through how they're not delivering. I have an email sent to their CEO that went ignored. Currently, they're limiting me to 43 Mbps upload on a 50 up plan. The stability of the 43 up tells me that it's clearly artificially limited and not merely oversubscription.
They are selling me something they have no intention of actually delivering. They are actively ensuring it won't be delivered.
They are selling me something they have no intention of actually delivering. They are actively ensuring it won't be delivered.
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This is what happens when we allow them to sell "up to" speeds instead of "minimum" speed guarantees. They should only be allowed to advertise what they can always deliver even in the worst case, plus the average case of "usually this". And if it turns out to be untrue, there should be some sort of automatic restitution engaged (for a dip) or an option to cancel the contract penalty free if it is long term.
I'm just going to start selling people "up to 5 TBps". I can't actually deliver that, but it is "up to". I'm really going to give you DSL, but I didn't lie in my statement about "up to". It might happen one day! /s but also kind of not really because ISPs definitely do this to a less exaggerated degree
I'm just going to start selling people "up to 5 TBps". I can't actually deliver that, but it is "up to". I'm really going to give you DSL, but I didn't lie in my statement about "up to". It might happen one day! /s but also kind of not really because ISPs definitely do this to a less exaggerated degree
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... my first, brief encounter with Frontier occurred decades ago in Wyoming. It seemed unbelievably greedy, broken and inept even then. Apparently, thru all those years they have steadfastly maintained their corporate vision.
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Cloud providers have figured it out. Sell a 99.9% SLA on networking, and if it falls below the SLA then you get a billing credit. Of course, that would require competition.
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How did any address ever get hooked up then?
ISPs used to shoulder the upfront cost of running the cabling to wire up locations. That's how phone and cable companies started, and how they run fiber to some locations, but only where they think they can get a lot signups for big, fat, expensive gigabit plans.
Phone and even cable companies used to have to provide universal coverage, subsidizing the costs of installing in the lower income areas with the higher income areas. Nowadays though, they just service the higher income areas with actual broadband, and leave the lower income areas to rot with DSL or older cable equipment. The economic incentives are there for them to act this way, and nobody is forcing anything like universal coverage on them for internet, since people still act like it's an optional service, instead of essential.
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... and yet when my company enters into a contract with Comcast business, there are clearly defined SLAs in the contract promising minimum acceptable standards with associated rate reductions when those standards are not met.
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It's some real failed country stuff that we have multiple crucial industries where the entire business model is just being openly predatory and fraudulent yet we can't muster the political will to do so much as occasionally fine the companies for amounts even equal to, let alone greater than, how much they made through the predatory fraud.
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But you know who will roll a construction crew without getting paid? A municipal ISP. Because wiring up their municipality, and keeping it wired up, would be their job. You know, like any other utility.
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