Frontier Corporation

Frontier thinks that five gigabytes is plenty of usage for their average high speed customer, so they’ve quietly added a new paragraph to their Residential Acceptable Use Policy telling customers they exceed that usage cap at the peril of their DSL account.

Frontier’s DSL product has been an also-ran for several years in many of its service areas where it faces a stronger product line from the incumbent cable operator. In Rochester, Frontier’s largest service area, Time Warner has made it their hobby to beat up Frontier for its inability to provide a guaranteed broadband speed, its long term contracts, and add-ons like “Peace of Mind” which charge a monthly fee for what savvy broadband users can usually find elsewhere for free.

Frontier quietly introduces a 5GB cap in their Acceptable Use Policy (July 23, 2008)

Cable operators have been discussing implementing usage caps in several markets to control what they refer to as a “broadband crisis.” The industry has embarked on a lobbying campaign to convince Americans, with scant evidence and absolutely no independent analysis of their numbers, that the country is headed to a massive shortage in bandwidth in just a few short years, and that a tiny percentage of customers are hogging your bandwidth.

Frontier, ever the rascally competitor, has decided to one-up Time Warner’s Road Runner product by slapping on a usage cap now for DSL customers before Road Runner considers doing the same. And in a spectacularly stupid move competitively, they have implemented a draconian cap that even the cable industry wouldn’t try to implement.

The propaganda marketing team at Frontier is valiantly efforting to convince you and your family than five gigabytes is more bandwidth than anyone should ever rightfully need, because that allotment will get you:

500,000 e-mails
1,750-2,500 High Resolution (6 megapixel) Photos
35,000-40,000 Web Pages
335 Hours of Online Game Time
1,250 Downloaded songs

Welcome to Fantasy Island, where these numbers require you to download AM radio quality tunes, never get any file attachments in your e-mail, never attempt to stream any media from those tens of thousands of web pages, and aren’t playing some of the most bandwidth-intensive games requiring fast speed and plenty of bandwidth. It looks like someone at Frontier has been at The Google looking for what can be accomplished with such a cap, because many of those stats came from websites also trying to convince customers you’ll get more with less from a usage cap.

The numbers just don’t add up. I randomly took 1,250 MP3 files from my collection and considered the total file size to see if I could indeed gather that many music files in just a month. I found 1,250 MP3 files = 8.15GB, assuming most were encoded between 128-192kbps. While it is true that e-mail is hardly likely to get you close to a usage cap of any kind (which is precisely why this application is so often touted by wireless phone data plans), keep in mind that spam messages eat into your limit, along with any graphics embedded in the message, as well as any attachments coming with it. Now spam comes at a price higher than just your annoyance in dealing with it.

Last year, we took a vacation up in Canada and took our midrange Canon digital camera with us. We set the quality to high (not the highest possible setting) because we wanted the flexibility of having our photos printed on paper. Most of our pictures ended up averaging between five and six megabytes apiece. That’s overkill if you intend to just look at your pictures online, but is reasonable for capturing as much detail as possible and coming out with a great printed picture. At those sizes, you’d better not need to transfer more than 1,000 pictures because you’ll be over the limit.

Of course, companies trying to justify these kinds of punitive caps rarely consider the real world experience of today’s Internet user. While there are some customers who use their Internet connection to look at e-mail and maybe browse some web pages and do occasional online banking and purchasing, more and more of us are taking advantage of the new applications being developed specifically for our broadband connections.

"Book 'em Danno!" They exceeded their cap watching us on Joost!

Virtually all of these applications go unmentioned by companies like Frontier. And all are considerably more bandwidth intensive than the applications Frontier likes to mention:

• Voice Over IP: Make and receive telephone calls through Vonage, MagicJack, Skype
• Netflix Online: Stream high quality movies direct to your television set
• Hulu, Joost, and Other Streaming Media Services: Watch your favorite TV shows right from your desktop
• Online Radio: Listen to Live365, XM, Sirius, and thousands of other online radio stations
• Remote Desktop: Control your computer from a remote location just as if you were sitting in front of it
• Online Backup: Backup your important files to an offsite server and restore them if disaster strikes
• Torrent/Media Downloading: Obtain large files quickly and easily
• Newsgroup Downloads: Access TV shows not available in your area, get old time radio shows, and more
• Webcam/Security Cam: Chat with Aunt Mary in full color video and show her the family or remotely monitor your home from a camera viewable online

All of these applications will easily bring you much closer to a cap. And if you have a family with kids, you already know what sharing an Internet connection can be like, especially if your son or daughter left a torrent downloading application running.

Frontier assumes today’s family is still living in 1986. As with every wired broadband company trying to ram through a backdoor rate increase with an unjustified cap, the Internet of the near future is going to be highly dependent on bandwidth rich applications delivering high quality video and audio to customers. Slapping a draconian cap  cuts most people off from where the Internet is headed in the next several years, all at a time when bandwidth costs are dropping! To be sure, with any unlimited application, there will be some people who seek to take advantage of it by attempting to run servers, resell the bandwidth, or engage in other activities that are contrary to the existing language of virtually every ISP’s Acceptable Use Policy.

Enforcing abuse provisions in existing AUPs can and does effectively control these handful of people that abuse the service. Punishing all of your customers with an unjustified usage cap only guarantees customers will flee to the competition at their first opportunity.