SubscribeBREAKING NEWS: Frontier Communications has modified their position on the 5GB usage cap yet again. Your pushback on this unjustified 5GB monthly usage cap has continued to make a real difference in getting company officials to listen to reason.
Frontier’s website has been changed again, now deleting the portions of their DSL sales pitch which used to reference “5GB” of included access per month. Additional changes have been made to their terms and conditions pages. Still present in Frontier’s Residential Acceptable Use Policy is the language which defines their usage cap at 5GB per month, although they don’t formally call it that. Instead, they consider 5GB to be a “reasonable” amount of usage, and reserve the right to terminate accounts that exceed it. However, some other language has been introduced as Frontier backs off from implementing their cap formally:
The Company has made no decision about potential charges for monthly usage in excess of 5GB.
Company officials have repeatedly said they will not penalize customers who exceed the 5GB “reasonable” level they define in their Acceptable Use Policy, which is to be commended. But as Frontier Communications has been continually modifying their position on the cap issue in general, both in comments to reporters and on their website, customers have no guarantees what they insist today won’t be much different tomorrow.
StopTheCap! calls on Frontier to do the right thing and remove this entire “5GB” section of their Residential Acceptable Use Policy altogether. It is this language upon which the entire 5GB usage cap debacle was built, and Frontier can show its good faith by eliminating it from their website if they truly want to put customers at ease.
We have also learned that Frontier has taken another piece of our advice: to launch a campaign to better educate and inform their customers about how bandwidth is utilized, and ways they can reduce their usage voluntarily.
StopTheCap! strongly believes that consumers are willing to review what they are doing with their Internet connections and will reduce usage voluntarily if they understood how certain applications can consume bandwidth even if they don’t seem to be running. And it’s a win-win for customers who wonder why their Internet connection seems so slow without realizing someone in the house is running a torrent server 24/7, or has a computer infected with a virus that is churning out millions of spam e-mails without the owner even realizing it.
Treating your customers right means allowing them to take advantage of the myriad of new applications and features a broadband experience can provide, without a draconian limit on that usage. And customers have a responsibility to better understand what they are running on their computers.
There are several additional developments about Frontier’s 5GB usage cap, and we’ll be publishing a roundup of the latest news, including your comments and what company representatives have been telling you, shortly.
This remains a developing story.
If Frontier executives want to educate their customers, they could start by modifying the first paragraph on that linked page explaining how much of various types of data fit into a monthly 5GB cap. They could include at least one example of any type of video file. Back at the end of July when I mentioned the omission of video data examples to a Frontier corporate relations spokesperson, she said she was sure that it was a “completely unintentional oversight.” Right, and I’m the tooth fairy. One month and 3 days later, that paragraph of how much of what kind… Read more »
Video is usually left out because of the way video is, from the sound bitrate, to video bitrate, to even length of bitrate. It can get pretty confusing from there if Frontier were to say how many hours of ??? quality video with bitrates and everything shooting around. But yes, I’m sure we can all agree that in today’s times, 5GB is just still way too low even since online video has been growing by the masses thanks to torrent based streaming (like VeohTV), LimeLight Networks, Akamai, etc… Heck, for those of you who watched the olympics recently, if you… Read more »
They don’t have to talk about bitrates and quality to talk about video. There are plenty of video services that people run into on a daily basis that have well known requirements: youtube, iTunes store rentals, netflix streaming, xbox HD rentals, and the Frontier bundle Dish on Demand downloaded films.
I think the honest truth is that NO video service can realistically be a regular part of any Frontier customer’s daily Internet experience with a 5GB usage cap. I spent the other Saturday streaming several hours of WWL-TV in New Orleans watching hurricane coverage. Just spending an afternoon watching one video stream, I consumed well over one gigabyte of bandwidth. YouTube and most of the other clip networks deliver lower bitrates than live streaming most broadcasters, and that is in standard low definition. Once we get into High Definition video, you can just forget it.
So did Frontier send out anything about the cap to customers in written format yet? I know I read somewhere that they were going to send something out in September, but I never received anything. I get my bill electronically from them, so I always wonder if I get the inserts everybody else does or not.
Is this site even still being updated?
On Friday I had emailed customer service asking about the alleged letter. I had not received anything in the US Mail about it so I thought I’d try the email inquiry. I also only get my Frontier bill electronically. And I am now only a telco customer, having bailed out of the DSL contract before the opt-out window closed. Meanwhile in Business Week there’s a 10/06/08 piece called Keeping Customers in a Crummy Economy. Frontier is mentioned in the article as “even sending sales representatives door-to-door [in upstate New York] to persuade customers to lock in another year’s worth of… Read more »
I just received a letter from frontier last week stating their cap. This is what it says: ” Today Frontier provides customers with multiple speed packages (e.g. 1 Mbps, 3 Mbps, 6 Mbps, etc.). Each basic package comes with 5 gigabytes of monthly usage. On a monthly basis, 5 Gb can provide 500,000 text emails, 1,750-2,500 photos, 40,000 Web page views, 335 hours of online gaming or 1,250 music downloads. Frontier’s average customer household uses between 1-1.5 Gb per month, so 5 Gb provides ample usage capability. In the first half of 2009 we plan to provide all High-Speed Internet… Read more »
I cancelled Frontier DSL service due to this insane cap. That is not the whole story though. I tried to get the three meg sped upgrade for close to a year maybe longer since it was advertised. The last request made on 09/20/08 for speed upgrade resulted in a Frontier tech advising me, I have 1.5 service and my area will not recieve any speed upgrades. That what I have is what I get. Cancelled service on the spot. Frontier wanted to know why. I told them the 5 gig cap and ‘slow’ speed is the reason. Well, what do… Read more »
Here we go again. We can ask Frontier customer service questions until we are blue in the face, but basically we (and the poor customer service reps that Frontier keeps leaving in the dark!) keep ending up reading about Frontier’s business plans in the news instead of in memos to the reps or letters to the customers. tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20081031/ap_on_hi_te/tec_internet_charges So the lastest info –an interview provided on 10/31 to the Associated Press by the CEO of Frontier– is that Frontier will “probably” start charging for overruns of their 5GB cap sometime in 2009 and that the charges will probably be one… Read more »
Liz, very well stated. I am too wondering if it is too late to get everybody in town to start downloading like mad so we don’t get labeled as “rural” and get stuck with the default 5GB usage (I can’t call it a cap because I can pay through the nose for as much as I want, heck I’ll take Comcast’s hard cap of 250GB in a heartbeat instead of paying those rates for overages).