Several weeks ago, I documented Frontier Communications as a potential competitor customers in the Rochester area could choose for cap-free DSL service.  Much of that information is in our “Alternatives” section.  Unfortunately, some of that information is wrong, not because I got it wrong, but because the customer service representative got it wrong when they shared it with me.

I now have had the opportunity to sit down and document the correct pricing information, as well as my DSL experience thus far.  This is also an important article for another reason — it helps explain why Frontier is never going to be a viable competitor for a lot of people in this community.

It’s All in the Bundle

Frontier Communications, like Time Warner, believes in the “bundle.”  They want to be your single provider for television, telephone, and broadband service.  The incentive for taking the bundle is the greater discount you receive from a combined package.  Take all three components, get the largest discount.  Take just one and the discount is less.

Unfortunately, Frontier has a problem with their bundle.  They cannot deliver a wired television package.  They resell Echostar’s DISH satellite system instead.  That automatically excludes some people who don’t have a good “look angle” to the proper spot in the sky to receive the satellite signal, do not want a dish on or about their house, or live in an apartment building that makes satellite equipment untenable.

Frontier’s broadband service uses ADSL (digital subscriber line) technology.  It transmits data on frequencies above the frequency range of the human voice, which lets you use the same phone line for both data and regular phone calls.  The telephone company gets to leverage their copper wire infrastructure to deliver Internet service to customers without having to rewire entire communities.

Unfortunately, DSL cannot provide as consistent a level of speed to customers as fiber or coaxial cable systems can.  That’s because the further away you are from the telephone company “switch,” or “central office” which serves your exchange, the lower the signal level reaches your home.  If you are within 5,000 feet of the central office, your speeds will likely achieve those close to what the company markets.  If you are within 5,000-10,000 feet, you’ll probably end up with around half of what they promise in their ads.  If you are over 10,000 feet, things start to drop off rapidly.  At over 18,000 feet, at least with Frontier, you are basically out of luck.  The phone company usually “locks” your speed at the rate which can best sustain itself without dropping out, in a setting on your modem.

For people who just use their connection for e-mail or web page browsing, they may not know the difference.  They don’t often understand 10Mbps down/1Mbps up, much less realize their effective speed might be far less than that.  But for anyone who uses higher bandwidth applications like video, downloading, and other types of streaming, the difference can be dramatic.

The Competitive Situation for Broadband in Rochester, N.Y.

Rochester divides the broadband market into two players: Time Warner, which has the largest percentage of broadband customers, and Frontier Communications, the local telephone company which has had a declining percentage of the market.  Clearwire and wireless data services do not have a significant market share for consumer broadband.

Time Warner has been cleaning up in Rochester because their infrastructure provides a far more consistent product, at substantially higher speeds, than what Frontier can provide.  The differences are dramatic for speeds, and consumers are not obligated with the cable provider into a term contract.  There is no equipment rental fee, and taxes are lower on the cable broadband product.

Frontier DSL can be less expensive than Road Runner, as part of a discounted bundle package.  Frontier routinely tries to market a bundle with a two year service commitment with a $300 cancellation fee.  But if you are outside of the range for acceptable DSL service, Frontier DSL is not an option at all.  If you are on the periphery of a central office switch, your service will be degraded, at best.   For many who are concerned about speed and performance, DSL locally has not kept up.

My Personal Experience With Frontier

Things weren’t going well from the start.  During my initial phone call to inquire about rates and packages for Frontier’s DSL service, confusion reigned on the part of the call center employee in DeLand, Florida.  That’s because we were enrolled in a long-since-discontinued Frontier Choices plan, which allowed customers to choose which phone features they wanted on their line for one flat price.  You just had to call and request them.  We were told that DSL would be available to us for an additional $29.99 per month.  We said yes.  The call center representative tried to add the service, but actually ended up stripping all of the included phone features we’ve used (caller ID, call waiting, etc.) out of the Frontier Choices package and began charging full retail price for each one.  Then, since the DSL service was not added properly, no proper work order was issued, no equipment was ever sent, but the billing sure started.  I should have realized something wasn’t right when the representative kept saying we qualified for “free wee-fee.”

Two weeks after waiting for the self-install kit to arrive, I called to inquire and was promised that a second self-install kit would be mailed out by overnight express.  That never arrived either.  I finally drove down to the local Frontier store and picked one up myself because I grew weary of waiting.  I installed it and… nothing.  The service didn’t work at all.

Finally, over the weekend, a Frontier specialist was assigned to the case and promised to get a service call established and get things straightened out.  It was then he discovered just how botched my account was.  Our last month’s bill was around $50.  This month, so far, it was $122.94 and counting.  Oh good.

After a prolonged conversation, we got the right account plans configured (details and pricing below).  Now all that was necessary was a service call to straighten out the horrendous speed I was getting after the service was activated.  The modem was locked at 320kbps down/192kbps up because that was all the line could sustain.  The representative in DeLand figured that with some creative technical work, we might achieve 6-7Mbps for downloads.  That was still less than the marketed 10Mbps down service, but within tolerable limits considering my distance from the office.

Frontier's Speedstream DSL Self-Install Kit

The Frontier representative that just completed work here was friendly and exceptionally helpful.  He diagnosed some problems with wiring, installed an external DSL filter outside the house, and ran a new wire to segregate the DSL signal from the telephone line.  One of the irritating side effects of DSL is that you can hear the subtle wooshing of the data stream in the background of all of your phone calls, even with the filters installed.  Phone cable traditionally has two pairs of wiring.  The Frontier technician left one pair for the basic phone line, and ran DSL down the other.

Then the moment of truth arrived.  What kind of speeds was my telephone line capable of providing me from Frontier’s DSL service?  After some testing, a very disappointing result: just over 3Mbps download speed could be provided at my location.  That is as good as it is going to get.  The technician himself complained that the call center representatives are wildly optimistic about speeds in the metro Rochester area.  Local technicians that know the area’s network of wiring are far better at predicting speed levels, and my technician was just a shy under what he thought my line could sustain.

Ultimately, that means a service that is 70% less than what was marketed, and I am not even close to being at the far end of acceptable DSL in Rochester – 18,000 feet maximum.

I am going to take a few days to contemplate all of this, but my initial leaning is to dump Frontier DSL and declare it a non-viable option, at least in my circumstance.  No company should expect a customer to be satisfied with a product or service that delivers only about 30% of what it promises, all at regular pricing.  I may lean on them to see if there is some alternative engineering solution to improve speeds, but if that doesn’t happen, I will likely exit Frontier’s data service before the 30 day satisfaction window closes.

Is Frontier Truly a Competitive Alternative for Broadband?

This is a very important question, because Frontier argues they are and Time Warner has never suggested they are the only provider in the area.  But it comes down to how you define “broadband.”  For suburban customers like myself, 3Mbps is honestly not an acceptable amount of speed for broadband service, especially at a price not too lower than what Time Warner charges for Road Runner.  Customers are stuck, because until they install the service, they won’t know what speeds they will ultimately achieve.  Sure it may work for light bandwidth uses, but it’s hardly a good value when the competition offers considerably more (for now at least).

This represents more evidence of the threat of the Broadband Backwater, where the dominant player exercises market power by limiting access, charging enormous overlimit fees, or refusing to upgrade because equal competition does not exist.  I am a textbook case of a customer that, based on my requirements, will have just one company to choose: Time Warner.  DSL cannot meet my needs with 3Mbps service, except perhaps as a backup.  If Time Warner caps usage, then my only true option would be to pay up to triple the price I am charged today for exactly the same service I get today.

The choice in Rochester would be clear: either take the capped and tiered broadband plan from Time Warner and ration your use of it, or go with Frontier for a potentially dramatically slower connection, with no cap for now.  And Frontier cannot match my current Road Runner Turbo service (15Mbps/1Mbps) at all.  It’s a choice consumers in this area should not be forced to make, and would not have to if more advanced services like Verizon FiOS were available here.

In Buffalo and Syracuse, both adjacent to Rochester, your choices include faster Road Runner service at the same price paid in Rochester, plus Verizon FiOS, with speeds as high as 50Mbps/20Mbps, which aren’t available in Rochester period.  Add draconian usage caps in the Flower City, and you might as well move.  Your broadband service sure won’t.

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Back during the first week of April, when all of the Time Warner drama hit, I promptly signed up for Frontier DSL here in Rochester.  I will not have an ISP in this house with usage caps, period.  Not now.  Not ever.  I realized I was hedging my bets, because if we were successful, Time Warner would back down and I’d effectively have two ISPs here (Frontier has term contracts).  Since I work from home, I figured it was a good idea to have a backup provider in case of an Internet outage, and I have always kept my Frontier phone service (I refuse to pay Time Warner for an overpriced VOIP “digital phone” service that is only a little less expensive than what Frontier charges for a real phone line).  Adding DSL onto a Frontier residential line isn’t actually that much more expensive, so it was a good option.

But let me tell you, even when you do Frontier right, they manage to screw it up and do you wrong.  As devoted readers will have noted, I’ve been waiting, and waiting, and waiting for the self-install kit to arrive.  It was supposed to ship days after placing the order.  Earlier this week, I followed up with Frontier again and got two different answers:

• We forgot to ship it.
• It got lost.

The representative promised to overnight a replacement on Tuesday.  Wednesday came and went, and now Thursday came and went.  Apparently the definition of “overnight” with Frontier bears no resemblence to my reality, or the rest of the planet Earth.  Anyway, come to find out, they never shipped the replacement either!

One of our readers recommended using Twitter to contact Frontier.  I’ve been messing with Twitter mostly since I got this site re-fired-up after Time Warner stepped in it, and I honestly have a lukewarm-hate relationship with the thing.  I’m not as bad as Maureen Dowd, NY Times columnist, who wrote she “would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account.”  I opened one and used it a few times.  But I just don’t get it.  Who the hell cares what I am thinking and doing from moment to moment.  I don’t even care that much, and I’m me!  As a group “pager” about new articles here, I suppose it might be useful, but I’ve discovered our Twitter addicts seem to already be doing a lot of that work for me.  I love to delegate.  I should get someone else here to take it over and handle it for me.

Anyway, Twittering Frontier made a friendly contact with an employee, but by this time Frontier was already working my last nerve, because nobody would tell me, “can’t I just drive 10 minutes away and pick up the damn thing at the Frontier store?”  So silly me, I waded around Frontier’s terrible website (Carmen Sandiego would get lost permanently on there) and finally found the Frontier Store number and called them.  How 1980s of me.  “Sure, we have tons of them here, just come on down.”  Twitter, indeed.

Oooooh… it makes me so mad.  I’ve been paying for a service I don’t have for three weeks, while those DSL modem things are just minutes away while I wait for some UPS guy to bring me one.

So they did it to me again.

I just don’t understand how a company gets run this way.  I really don’t.  But I have the gosh darn thing, and later tonight I will begin documenting my experiences with it for our readers who might want Frontier as an alternative.  I’m already unhappy about the glorious waste of time I’ve had thus far, but perhaps I’ll be surprised with what will come next.  We’ll see.

[Editor’s Note: When the original article below was published, one of our Buffalo readers notified us the clip didn’t match the location, and we accidentally discovered a bug which apparently resulted in a few TV stations using the same video delivery platform getting clips mixed up between them.  My thanks to our reader who wishes to remain anonymous who alerted us to this problem, and allowed us to correct it.  Most of the original article still applies, but I’ve modified the details to match the reality!]

Although Buffalo was spared from any experiments with tiered pricing, they weren’t spared the annual rate hike.  One of the interesting differences between Buffalo and Rochester, which are adjacent to one another, is the competitive situation on the ground.

Buffalo has competition across the telephone, broadband, and television business from Time Warner and Verizon, which has wired a significant portion of Erie county with Verizon’s FiOS fiber to the home service.  The two compete effectively with similar product lines.

Rochester has competition across the telephone and broadband business from Time Warner and Frontier Communications, but the latter is stuck reselling DISH satellite service to provide a competing video package, and also has somewhat slower broadband service.  The two are not equal competitors across the board.

Buffalo, like many Time Warner divisions, offers “price protection agreements” in their territory.  Rochester does not — there are no contracts that commit Time Warner customers to any term of service.  In the Rochester market, the competitive threat from Frontier Communications has been judged so weak, there has never been a reason for Time Warner to bother with them in the Flower City.

Competition explains why one market has them and another does not.  In highly competitive markets, customers are tempted to hop from one provider to the other, and back again, to take advantage of substantial new customer discounts or other incentives.  Marketing costs to provide these discounts and incentives can be substantial, and customers can and do exploit them to save money.

The “price protection agreement,” which is another way of saying a “term commitment contract,” anchors customers with one provider for an extended period (typically one to three years), with a substantial penalty for early cancellation.

In less competitive markets, the dominant provider can avoid using contracts because most customers are reluctant to switch to an inferior product.  It also gives that provider the opportunity to bash the lesser competitors, which often do have contracts, with comparison advertising.  Time Warner Rochester has, attacking Frontier’s bundles for lengthy contract terms and $200-300 penalties if customers try and cancel early.  Clearwire is such a minor player, they exist below the radar.  But they have contracts as well, if you want the lowest price service.

In Buffalo, when Time Warner increased rates, Robin Wolfgang, Public Affairs VP for Buffalo, appeared on WGRZ to explain why rates had increased and also suggested customers hop on a price protection agreement to protect them from price changes during the contract.  During the recent Road Runner tiered pricing controversy, many customers outside of Rochester quickly signed up for these agreements for similar reasons – to avoid tiered Road Runner pricing for a few years longer.

This report from WGRZ has a reporter who sounds very familiar to Rochester residents.  Yes, that’s Dave McKinley who spent 18 years in Rochester broadcasting.  His report covers all of the bases, takes a mildly contrary position about where prices are heading, and lets Time Warner have their say.  I would have liked to see a customer complaining about the rate increases though.

Verizon Selling Internet-Phone-TV Package in FiOS Areas for $95 a Month

One of the reasons StoptheCap! always believed Time Warner chose the cities it did for its cap experiment was to steer clear of Verizon, particularly where the company offers its fiber optic service to homes.  Verizon FiOS does not cap Internet usage and has made that well known.

The blowback from Time Warner’s experimental caps wasn’t just limited to the cities “lucky” enough to be chosen.  The story went national, and now competitors are moving in to take advantage of Time Warner’s public relations catastrophe and poach their customers.

Verizon is now offering customers in FiOS territories a bundle of services that are priced well below what Time Warner is charging people in nearby cities where FiOS isn’t.  For $94.99 a month for the first year ($99.99 a month for the second), they are bundling an unlimited digital phone service, a basic cable package with up to 295 channels and a dozen HD channels, and broadband service at 10Mbps down and 2Mbps up!  Oh, and they’ll also give you a $150 rebate in the form of a debit card.  I pay $170 a month to Time Warner in Rochester and don’t even get their digital phone product, and standard Internet service here is 10Mbps down and a silly 384Kbps up.  Ahhh… competition.

And Verizon will, for $10 more, give you 20Mbps down and 5Mbps up, as well as 350 channels, more than 50 in HD.  I have to pay $10 more here and that only gives me “Turbo” Road Runner offering 15Mbps down and 1Mbps up (plus the Powerboost gimmick).  That’s it.

Verizon High Speed Internet DSL Service For $18 A Month

Now you see why Time Warner doesn’t dare try their cap experiment in a community where FiOS is available.  Why would anyone stay a customer?  Heck, even if you wanted to stay with Time Warner for phone and television service, you can buy faster broadband from Verizon on their 10/2 tier for $45 a month, and no caps.

Verizon also gets to target communities where FiOS isn’t yet available, but Time Warner’s threatened caps were, with a guaranteed two year contract-fixed price for DSL comparable to Road Runner Lite for $18 a month. Or they’ll sell their highest DSL tier (7.1Mbps down/768kbps up) for $38 a month and no modem rental fee. No caps there either.

Frontier continues to enjoy smacking Time Warner around for its duplicitous “caps are about you saving money” campaign.  In the Sunday Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, they took another shot at Time Warner’s CEO Glenn Britt for accusing customers of “misunderstanding” their plan, where they try and convince customers that emptying their wallets and handing more money over to Time Warner is somehow a good thing.

Thanks to StoptheCap! reader Bob for sending along the Frontier ad.  Now, if Frontier had not lost the first self-install kit they sent our way (and are supposedly re-shipping express mail to arrive here today), we could have been hooked up by now.

GigaOM blows the lid off what will likely be an upcoming target of StoptheCap! — the ludicrous and unacceptably botched usage cap trial in Reno, Nevada by AT&T.

It seems that new customers to AT&T’s high speed Internet service aren’t being told their usage is being capped, until the mailman delivers an express letter to your home with the shocking news after you’ve already signed up for service!

Adding insult to injury, their tiers for traditional DSL max out with an 80GB allowance on their “Elite tier,” which only offers up to 6Mbps service.  That might be “elite” in Kenya, but it shouldn’t be in a major American city.  Each additional gigabyte comes at the traditional Pillage Price of $1/GB, which is nearly 1,000% above what it costs them to provide.  And for the woman who brought all this to the attention of GigaOM, there is no competitor currently available for broadband.

The Super Whammo Extreme Maxalot tier of 150GB isn’t even available unless you have access to their U-verse fiber-alternative service.  Also, incompetence seems to be the order of the day over at AT&T:  GigaOM reported that customer service representatives denied there was a usage cap at all when the Lake Tahoe-area resident called to inquire.

AT&T’s letter explaining the limits is reproduced below the fold.  Customers signing up for service at att.com will need to call the Psychic Hotline to discern that there is a cap in place on their service — not one word of it appears on their website as the screen captures GigaOM obtained illustrate.

Of course AT&T is also the home of the “unlimited” AT&T Wireless DataConnect plan that, in the fine print, changes your reality of what the word “unlimited” means to their own, which means “not more than 5GB.”

Sounds like bait and switch to us and the next step should be a contact with the Nevada Attorney General’s office, the Better Business Bureau, local and state officials, and the Congressional delegation for Nevada.  If AT&T wants to treat Reno like a broadband backwater, they couldn’t do a better job of it by also forgetting to tell customers until after they already signed up.

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