[HN Gopher] FTC and several states sue Frontier Communications r...
___________________________________________________________________
FTC and several states sue Frontier Communications regarding
internet speeds
Author : marc__1
Score : 284 points
Date : 2021-05-19 17:13 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| mrpippy wrote:
| 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...
| bfuller wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| charwalker wrote:
| 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.
| dataflow wrote:
| 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...
| ddingus wrote:
| 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.
| cletus wrote:
| 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
| _n_b_ wrote:
| 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.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I wish Canada would start going after our internet providers..
| it's really a joke up here.
| wmf wrote:
| 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)
| mikelward wrote:
| So all surveyed DSL providers are under delivering?
| MrRadar wrote:
| I have VDSL2 service from CenturyLink and I actually get
| better speeds than I pay for (I pay for 40/20 and get around
| 47/18 in speed tests).
| ggggtez wrote:
| Not to point out the obvious but by your own admission
| you're only getting 90% upload.
| MrRadar wrote:
| 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.
| wmf wrote:
| At this point DSL is basically inferior technology that you
| only use if you have no other choice.
| ggggtez wrote:
| That's how I read the chart too. Though I don't know if those
| 4 represent _all_ DSL providers.
| ddingus wrote:
| I am on Ziply now. No real complaints.
|
| 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.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| > 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.
| ddingus wrote:
| I agree with you.
|
| 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.
| mfer wrote:
| 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.
| phamilton wrote:
| 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.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Before you credit frontier with that, most of Frontier's
| fiber was acquired from Verizon and represents a minority in
| their customer base.
| mfer wrote:
| 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.
| troydavis wrote:
| Here's the FTC press release and complaint:
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/05/ftc-s...
| conorh wrote:
| I have frontier fiber in FL and it is rock solid, one of the
| better ISPs I have had. This is ex Verizon territory though.
| andrew_ wrote:
| 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.
| rasengan0 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/ajit-pai-
| refuses...
| inson wrote:
| when FTC will go after comcast for their monopoly and ridiculous
| prices?
| kevingadd wrote:
| 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.
| ronnier wrote:
| 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.
| mjevans wrote:
| 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'.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 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.
| TomMasz wrote:
| When I canceled my DSL the person on the phone admitted their
| service was lousy. They just gave up trying to defend crappy
| service.
| app wrote:
| 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.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| 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".
| xbar wrote:
| Why didn't Ajit Pai do this?
| TomMasz wrote:
| 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.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| 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.
| dikaio wrote:
| Cox should be next.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| Where can I donate?
| gruez wrote:
| FTC is a government agency.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Reminds me of a Reddit user who asked for the source of an
| apparently intelligent bot. They got a reply similar to: http
| s://ftp.ensembl.org/pub/release-104/fasta/homo_sapiens/d...
| admissionsguy wrote:
| I expected it to be a joke page. It would make a brilliant
| 1st April post, actually.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| People actually do it!
|
| https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/gift/gift.ht
| m
| maximilianroos wrote:
| 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.
| t3rabytes wrote:
| This could just be pinned down to Frontier using fiber and
| Spectrum using coax, yes?
| seizethegdgap wrote:
| Spectrum offers a "Gigabit" package, but it's asymmetric
| 940/35. Full Duplex DOCSIS via DOCSIS 4.0 is coming
| (https://stopthecap.com/2019/06/25/cables-
| docsis-4-0-symmetri...), and it looks like Comcast is
| demo'ing it in a lab (https://www.lightreading.com/cable-
| tech/10g/comcast-full-dup...), but who knows how much longer
| it'll take to get it fully up to speed.
| selectodude wrote:
| West LA is mostly old Verizon Fios infra.
| rcpt wrote:
| 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.
| jp42 wrote:
| I have gigabit plan and supposed to get up to 1gbps speed, I have
| never seen speed above 150mbps.
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| 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.
| sand500 wrote:
| Unsure about fiber but for cable, usually you need to make
| sure your modem is a docsis 3.1
| mips_avatar wrote:
| 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.
| tomxor wrote:
| 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!
| InitialBP wrote:
| 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.
|
| Some details about WV's past with Frontier
| https://www.wvpublic.org/government/2020-12-10/frontier-has-...
| sigzero wrote:
| I have a lot of friends in WV. They all complain about this
| company.
| graton wrote:
| 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...
| cronix wrote:
| 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.
| caymanjim wrote:
| > 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.
| dougg3 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Based on what I've read over on the Ziply subreddit, Frontier's
| network was in poor shape when Ziply took over. For example:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ZiplyFiber/comments/kw56u4/does_zip...
| milkytron wrote:
| > 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.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| 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.
| milankragujevic wrote:
| 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| > 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.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| This isn't entirely the whole story.
|
| Every ISP oversubscribes. OP is correct.
|
| 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.
| anticristi wrote:
| > 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| 50% of actual usage or subscribed throughput?
| anticristi wrote:
| 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.
| hellotomyrars wrote:
| 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.
| borski wrote:
| 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).
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| CenturyLink 6 Mbps DSL was normally ~6.2 Mbps. Sometimes it
| would go down to 5Mbps.
| wmf wrote:
| Tests (see my other comment) show that DSL ISPs routinely
| deliver worse service than cable in the US.
|
| IMO "up to N Mbps" is fair if the ISP routinely delivers, but
| if they never deliver N Mbps (hey Frontier) then it's just
| plain fraud.
| milankragujevic wrote:
| 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.
| wmf wrote:
| 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.
| milankragujevic wrote:
| If they managed to get the middle mile congested with 10
| Mbps customers I will give them the "A$$hole of the
| millennium" award right here right now.
| sidlls wrote:
| 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."
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| 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.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| 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.)
| edgyquant wrote:
| 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.)
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.)
| porknubbins wrote:
| 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.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > at least as a short burst
|
| Ok, I worked in telecom and saw the roll out of priority
| bursting... to me, this makes your data a yes.
|
| Every ISP does in fact over sub.
|
| They put in boosting and over provisioning to stop
| complaints.
|
| The service would be far more expensive if they had to
| guarantee sustained speeds, or rather that you had a
| guaranteed bandwidth potential.
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| 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".
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _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".
| nucleardog wrote:
| 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.
| Lammy wrote:
| 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 a la
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_of_NSA_surveilla...
| nucleardog wrote:
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| 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.
| edgyquant wrote:
| 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.
| vondur wrote:
| 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.
| sschueller wrote:
| 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.
| chrischen wrote:
| While not a certification i think some speed testing apps do
| show by network.
| edgyquant wrote:
| 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.
| wnevets wrote:
| I must be lucky, I'm currently getting ~100Mpbs higher than the
| advertised speeds for Fios.
| tw04 wrote:
| 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.
| GNOMES wrote:
| 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.
| djanogo wrote:
| 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.
| ggggtez wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ep103 wrote:
| 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.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| 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.
| djrogers wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Well, to be fair, the reason they chose DSL is so they
| wouldn't _have_ to run infra to every house - POTS lines were
| already there.
| _vertigo wrote:
| 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.
| hguant wrote:
| This comment violates one of the tenets of HN which keeps it
| a good place for discussion.
|
| >Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling,
| brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades
| discussion and is usually mistaken.
|
| What does your comment add?
| _vertigo wrote:
| 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".
| dikaio wrote:
| Agreed
| dvdkon wrote:
| 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.
| CodeBeater wrote:
| >> 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?
| joshstrange wrote:
| > 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.
| djanogo wrote:
| 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.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Do you think somebody at Frontier stole the bIlLIONs of
| US gov money and bought yachts?
|
| May 27, 2020: Court signs off on $38M in executive bonuses
| at Frontier. (Source:
| https://www.channelfutures.com/telephony-uc-
| collaboration/fr...)
|
| SEVEN WEEKS LATER, July 16, 2020: Frontier seeks, and is
| granted an ADDITIONAL $25M in executive bonuses. (Source:
| https://www.law360.com/articles/1292694/frontier-wins-ok-
| for...)
| jackson1442 wrote:
| > 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...
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| $80+ for GbPS is an understatement. I pay $80/mo for a
| symmetric 250Mbps line. 1G would cost me over $500/mo
| bfuller wrote:
| I live in the rural USA and pay $175 for 55 mb/s down, 10mb
| up on a good day. And if a bad thunderstorm hits it will be
| down for days.
| companiooon wrote:
| 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.
| avelis wrote:
| FTC needs to investigate Spectrum Communications as well (Charter
| + TWC merger). That merge did nothing to increase capacity for
| their subscribers.
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