Frontier Communications officially put to bed the notion of its 5GB usage cap in an interview with the Associated Press yesterday, but that’s old news for readers of StoptheCap! Sources told us on April 5th that Frontier had elected to drop its usage cap and would begin a marketing effort to recruit disaffected Time Warner customers upset about the company’s bandwidth limiting plans.
“We have gotten hundreds of calls from Time Warner customers into our call centers,” said Ann Burr, the head of Frontier’s Rochester unit, in an interview with The Associated Press. “I guess it’s been a public relations crisis for Time Warner.”
No kidding.
Now the DSL provider is signing up customers faster than it can send out the equipment. Our DSL self-install kit here at StoptheCap! is now nearly a week overdue. Customer service representatives told me last night they are being flooded with calls in the greater Rochester area and have been working at full speed to process orders from customers dropping Time Warner.
Frontier is currently the best option available for broadband customers in the Rochester metropolitan area. It offers speeds of “up to” 10 Mbps for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads, but real world experience reported by readers indicates the actual speed is closer to 7 Mbps and around 650 Kbps for uploads. Additional information on plan pricing and terms can be found in our Alternatives section. Unfortunately, DSL service is not available in all areas where Time Warner provides service, due to telephone equipment limitations, and in areas where another telephone provider may not be able to extend service.
Frontier Communications and StoptheCap! have had a contentious history. This website was launched last summer when Frontier was seriously contemplating a bandwidth usage cap of 5GB per month, an extraordinarily low amount more commonly found on wireless data plans offered by cellular providers. Consumers throughout Frontier’s service areas in multiple states joined forces with StoptheCap! to reject the usage caps, and the company eventually backed off, leading to a de facto truce last fall.
The specter of the 5GB usage cap lives on in the Acceptable Use Policy of Frontier, although company officials have publicly stated they will not even consider enforcing a cap through the end of 2010. The company reserves the right to revisit the need for usage caps, but customers can sign up for two or three year term “price protection agreements” which have been exempted from any cap imposition for the length of the contract.
From the Associated Press:
Dave Burstein, editor of the DSL Prime broadband industry newsletter, said the Obama administration is also likely to be tough on metered billing. Traffic limits of 10 gigabytes or 40 gigabytes like the ones Time Warner Cable is testing aren’t justified by the cost of providing that data, he said.
“Anybody who thinks that’s not an attempt to raise prices and keep competitive video off the network — I have a bridge to sell them, and it goes to Brooklyn,” Burstein said.
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