While several residents of Mound, Minnesota try to negotiate to keep their broadband service from Frontier Communications after the company sent them letters threatening to cut off their service, a Rochester, N.Y. television station handed over five minutes of airtime during its morning newscast that was little more than a promotion piece for Frontier’s broadband packages, right down to quoting inaccurate pricing, but no time to mention to viewers the company maintains a 5GB “appropriate usage limit” in its Acceptable Use Policy.

WHAM-TV ran a virtual infomercial (thanks to PreventCAPS for the tip) that was supposed to be about changing service providers, but devolved into a promotional puff piece for Frontier.  Among the services promoted were high bandwidth applications you can ostensibly use with Frontier DSL, despite the company’s continued insistence on defining an acceptable amount of usage at a level so low, you can’t possibly use those applications much and stay within the limits.

Michael Johns, from Frontier’s Network Operations Center misquoted Frontier’s own rates for DSL service, claiming the company sells service for between $18-26 a month, which seemed quite low.  We called Frontier Communications this morning to ask for those prices, telling the representative we saw them on WHAM’s sister CW Network station “CW16.”  The customer service representative in DeLand, Florida didn’t know what we were talking about.

In fact, we were quoted a far higher price for Frontier High-Speed Internet Lite – 768kbps service, with no term commitments starting at $39.99 a month. The representative claimed they could reduce the price, but only with a multi-year term commitment and a service bundle that included phone service. Even with those discounts, the price was still more than $20 a month. Considering Frontier’s term commitments carry a steep early disconnect penalty, there isn’t much value to be found here.

For standard 10Mbps DSL service, $26 a month isn’t going to get you far. In fact, Frontier wants around $45 a month for the service, not including a modem rental fee/equipment charge of $4 per month. Again, there were some discounts available for bundling, but they always carried those pesky term commitments and never brought the price down to what Johns claimed was available.

Michael Johns (left) from Frontier speaks with WHAM reporter Evan Dawson (right)

Also along for the ride was a hard sell for add on products like “anti-spam technology,” hard drive backup, technical support for your computer and Internet service — each carrying an additional monthly price.

Getting Frontier pinned down on prices is next to impossible as the representative kept coming back with new offers when I didn’t agree to “begin the sign up process today.” Apparently there is plenty of room for negotiation when signing up for Frontier service in a market where Time Warner Cable eats their DSL service for breakfast.

But the most fun came last when I asked about Frontier 5GB monthly usage allowance. The representative promised me “we don’t do that in your area so you can ignore that,” and “we’re never going to hold you to that. It’s there so we can control the pirate downloaders.” When I asked why Mound, Minnesota was apparently a hotbed of pirates (who knew?) the representative didn’t understand what I was talking about. When I explained, she put me on hold and came back apparently now acquainted with Frontier’s experimental hard capping in Mound, and asked me how I found out about that.

How did I, indeed.

If such experiments are deemed successful by the company, all of Frontier’s customers will find out about them soon enough.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WHAM Rochester Changing Your Internet Provider 5-3-10.flv[/flv]

On Monday, WHAM-TV’s sister station “CW16” handed over five minutes of the morning news for an extended-length commercial for Frontier Communications.  Judge for yourself whether this story was about how to change providers or how to change to Frontier DSL.  (5 minutes)