A well placed source at Frontier told Stop the Cap! that the response to the quietly introduced 5GB monthly usage cap has not been positive among some of the more online aware employees at the company, who have expressed concern to management about how exactly they can explain and justify a monthly cap which is as low, if not lower, than many cell phone companies charge for their wireless plans.

The source told us that the impetus for the cap wasn’t just a concern about a few bad apples “overusing” their resources, but individuals in some markets purchasing multiple commercial or residential accounts and attempting to resell that bandwidth as part of some home-grown ISP business. The legal department quickly assembled some changes which were quietly introduced, without any fanfare, as part of Frontier’s residential acceptable use policy.

Our take? The logic train derailed on this one. Assuming for a moment that resellers were the driving force behind this action, Frontier’s response fails on several counts:

• Commercial DSL customers are not currently subject to any usage caps so a reseller need only configure multiple commercial accounts and go right on reselling without any fear of breaking a usage cap.
• Existing provisions in Frontier’s policies forbid the resale or repurposing of their product already. Resellers can be turned off today without any punitive measures taken against their entire residential customer base.
• The imposition of this change in terms buried in fine print is a sneaky way to attempt to force customers under multi-year contract to agree to the changes by default. Under the provisions of Frontier’s contract, customers automatically agree to any changes in terms published on their website unless they opt out in writing within 30 days. Frontier assumes most people will never notice, and considering the lousy quality of their website, where finding definitive information about anything is an all-day affair, that would not be a surprising outcome.

Those who are aware of the local broadband market who are also working at Frontier have every right to be worried. Their careers may evaporate along with Frontier’s customer base who will almost certainly flee the service the moment they become aware of the outrageous limitations Frontier seeks to impose on their customers. It’s a boneheaded move by Frontier, but just another in a long line of foolish mistakes on the part of this company, which is frittering away their core business with rate increases, a deteriorating network, and now this.

On a side note, we are also told that Frontier is no longer actually providing anything close to the 10mbps download/1mbps upload service they are now advertising. Our source tells us the network could not sustain anything close to those speeds, so they have quietly cut back to speeds closer to 7mbps/450kbps. Aging infrastructure and lack of investment will do that to you.