Frontier’s quiet introduction of a ridiculously low 5GB per month usage cap represents a materially adverse change to their contract with customers. While many Frontier DSL customers maintain a month-to-month relationship with the company, with no penalties for terminating service, there are many who signed up for promotions obligated to a term of 12-36 months of service, with steep penalties for cancelling service before the term expires.

If you are a Frontier DSL customer upset about the imposition of the 5GB usage cap, you have several avenues of recourse. Simply find which category of subscriber you are below and follow the instructions to begin the process of challenging this change in service.

Be aware that Frontier’s contract states that subscribers have 30 days to opt out or cancel service after a change in the terms of service has first been announced. Although ISPs should notify you with a letter in your mailbox or a specific e-mail on a subject of this level of importance, to date Frontier has chosen to notify customers through a change on their website, buried in fine print. Their terms and conditions permit this, and that means you only have until August 23, 2008 to complete the process of opting out of this usage cap. If you continue to subscribe after than date without opting out, you are agreeing to continue service under the new contract terms with no further right to opt out by default.

The key that permits you to unlock your contract can be found within the Frontier Residential High-Speed Internet Terms and Conditions:

Our Right To Make Changes

UNLESS OTHERWISE PROHIBITED BY LAW, WE MAY CHANGE PRICES, TERMS AND CONDITIONS AT ANY TIME BY GIVING YOU 30 DAYS NOTICE BY BILL MESSAGE, E-MAIL OR OTHER NOTICE, INCLUDING POSTING NOTICE OF SUCH CHANGES ON THIS WEB SITE, UNLESS THE PRICES, TERMS AND CONDITIONS ARE GUARANTEED BY CONTRACT. YOU ACCEPT THE CHANGES IF YOU USE THE SERVICES AFTER NOTICE IS PROVIDED.

If You Are a Frontier DSL Customer With No Minimum Term Commitment Obligation

1. Call Frontier Residential Customer Service Serving Your Area
2. Tell them you wish to terminate your DSL service because of the imposition of the 5GB usage cap.
3. Get a date certain when your service will expire and arrange for the return of any Frontier property.
4. Arrange for an alternative provider, and make sure to ask about service promotions for new customers.

If You Are a Frontier DSL Customer with a 12/24/36 Month Minimum Term Commitment

1. Gather the following material before calling – A copy of your service contract, a copy of the terms and conditions for opting out of contract changes as shown above, a copy of the Residential Acceptable Use Policy with the language about the 5GB usage cap noting the contract language was changed on July 23, 2008 (it’s at the bottom of the page), a pen and paper to take down names and information.
2. Call Frontier Residential Customer Service (1-800-921-8101). Ask for and write down the name of the representative and extension number, if any.
3. Tell them you are calling to opt out of the July 23, 2008 change to your contract which imposes a usage cap of 5GB per month on your usage. Explain that when you initiated service with Frontier, no such limitation was imposed in your contract, and this usage cap represents a materially adverse revision to your contract. Explain that in accordance with the provision under the Terms & Conditions, section “Our Right to Make Changes,” you are exercising your right to opt out and not accept the change in terms they are imposing, and that you are doing so within the 30-day window permitted by the contract.
4. Under the terms of this contract, Frontier has two options. First, they may accept your opt out request and waive the 5GB usage cap for the remainder of your existing contract. If they do, you are not obligated to follow their usage cap until your term length contract expires. You are obligated to continue service with Frontier for the remainder of your contract because the materially adverse change does not apply to you. If you still elect to cancel, they may impose the early termination fee. Or second, they may refuse to waive the 5GB usage cap, at which point you then have the right to terminate your contract immediately with no imposition of an early cancellation fee. It is an either/or proposition. They cannot unilaterally change the terms of a contract with you unless the contract language specifically permits them to do so (and you agreed to that).
5. Do not be surprised if the low level customer service representative you first speak to is unwilling to accept your opt out request. Do not be surprised if their immediate supervisor is not willing to accept your request either. Customer service representatives may not be empowered to process such a request. Some may even attempt to argue with you about it. If you meet resistance, you should hang up and call the “Executive Office” customer service department at 1-866-819-3932. The Executive Office is empowered to do considerably more to resolve customer complaints.
6. If you are uncertain if your request will be processed in accordance with your conversation, ask for a confirmation in writing that your service will be cancelled with no termination penalty. It also wouldn’t hurt to ask for a mailing address to send a written formal letter opting out of their contract changes so that you cover all the bases. Usually getting the names of the people you are speaking with during your phone call(s) will suffice, however.
7. It is extremely important that in all your dealings with customer service, you remain polite, professional, and persuasive. Never raise your voice, belittle, or demean Frontier or their representatives. In most cases, the person you are speaking with had no involvement in Frontier’s decision to impose usage caps and may not even be familiar with the issue. Attacking them will not get you the results you are looking for. If you meet resistance, thank them for their time and move on up to the next representative or the Executive Office. You should definitely inform them of your reasons for opting out of your contract and clearly and firmly state you will not do business with an Internet provider imposing a usage cap, particularly one that advertises in their own phone directory that their service offers, “unlimited access to the web – NO usage fees, NO toll charges.” (Frontier Rochester White Pages, Blue tabbed section, p.22)

If you encounter difficulties, please feel free to post your story here in our Comments section. You’ll find a link at the top of this article. If you encounter a particularly helpful representative, feel free to give us contact information so that others can follow your successful navigation to a satisfactory outcome. Sometimes one representative will develop a reputation of working with customers while others remain difficult. If others can contact the friendly representative directly, it can speed up the process.

Frontier may also suggest that they are not actively enforcing any usage cap at this time. However, this should not discourage you from exercising your rights to not agree to the changes they have made to their contract language. Just because they are not enforcing it today doesn’t mean they won’t enforce it 60 days from now, at which point your time window to exit your contract will have expired. Explain to the representative that you must insist on following through with your request to opt out because their contract requires you to do so to preserve your rights.

Dave Burstein, reporting for GigaOM, said that two FCC Commissioners were overheard discussing Frontier’s decision to cap its customers at 5GB of usage per month at an FCC hearing in Washington.

The Federal Communications Commission has taken an interest in the broadband industry and reviewing its competitiveness and service, particularly to underserved rural areas. They are also concerned about net neutrality – where large Internet Service Providers can offer preferential treatment to their partners with faster backbone speeds, exemptions from usage caps, and more prominent placement of their content.

Burstein reports, “Frontier in 2007 had capital spending of $315,793 which seems like a lot until you note their Depreciation expense was $374,435. [A] five gigabyte [cap] is so low even a 2002 style network can handle it, but not maintaining the network is going to hurt them and their customers.”

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.

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.