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A lawn sign promoting Frontier fiber optic broadband at a new housing development in Ogden, N.Y. [Image courtesy: Craig]
Stop the Cap! reader Craig sent along word Frontier was using lawn signs to promote fiber broadband outside of the nearly complete Bella Estates — a development in the town of Ogden.
This is not the first project of this type for Frontier, which installs optical fiber in most new housing developments as they are built. Customers are typically offered fiber-fed broadband service at the same download speeds offered to Frontier’s DSL customers. With Frontier committed to providing basic telephone service throughout its operating service areas, stringing new optical fiber costs only a little more than using traditional copper wiring.
However, Frontier’s attitude about scrapping customers’ existing copper wiring in favor of fiber optics is very different. Frontier is among the last major independent phone companies not building its own significant fiber to the neighborhood or fiber-to-the-home service in its legacy service areas. Instead, it has adopted networks acquired from AT&T (U-verse in Connecticut) and Verizon (FiOS in Indiana and the Pacific Northwest, and possibly Florida, Texas and California as well).
“Once again, Frontier is only expanding where it feels like it,” writes Craig.
If FTR can offer fiber speeds of 30/30 for $19.95, that must mean that they can make $$$ on it. If that is true, why don’t they spend their Capex on expanding this to their huge numbers of copper DSL customers that get 1.5 or 3 or 6 DSL?
Oh, I forgot, they would rather give out dividends than build for the future.
Say WHAT?! 30 symmetrical for 20 a month?
Oh wait, there must be a cap and you deal with crappy customer service.
Nevermind
Actually stringing fiber to a new location probably isn’t more expensive than running copper when you consider OPEX as well as CAPEX.
That’s an astonishingly low price, and it calls into question how it is Frontier can get $90 for a DSL double play that tops out at 2Mbps. Hopefully this is the beginning of the endgame for Frontier’s “low fiber diet”.
Running fiber at 30/30???
Isn’t that a little bit like driving a car, but getting out and pushing it in neutral with the occupants of the car?
30M up is no joke. Comcast offers that speed at their 250M tier and Cablevision at their 101 tier (35 rather than 30) but no other non-fiber provider does 30M uploads, and even a few FTTH providers don’t go that far for some reason.
Download speeds are a bit anemic, sure, but if that service was available at that price in my area I’d already be signed up for it in addition to my 300/20 cable connection that’s a little over 4x the price.