Frontier Of Failure: Verizon FIOS Fumble Costs An ISP The Game (Opinion)

[littleleo]

I wouldn't mind seeing internet services becoming a government run service (at least as an alternative). The Internet has become a critical service in the modern world.

Chattanooga appears to be a model pioneering example of city-run (10gbps) internet service. https://epb.com/

Sometimes critical services and capitalism just don't pair well.

Lets take a bit of time to think about that statement.
You're basically giving over your privacy to an inefficient institution that shuts down every other year because the yahoos cannot agree on anything. Capitalism pushes companies to do better than their competitor unless there are no competitors in the area they have a monopoly but that will not last long as other companies will strive to do better.
Bottom line is everything works itself out.

The problem is all these ISP with crappy service are usually the only game in town and they have agreements with the other ISP near by not to infringe in their zone. Why do you think they get so upset when cities setup their own internet service which run better and are cheaper then what the local ISP will offer.

 

[drtweak]

My parents have FiOS, sounds like we have been some of the lucky few who have not had any issues. A friend of mine who lives in the same area had an outtage for a week and a half. Call after Call, they same the same thing as this guy have. Oh give it 48 hours, oh no tech showed up, oh we didn't have you down for a tech to come out, blah blah blah. Short story, as of two days ago they were Time Warner Customers.

Now with working at a IT business I am a TW rep where they pay you if you get people to sign up, but out in Orange County in CA where you have either ATT/TW/COX, ATT sucks. Slow DSL speeds, all kinds of issues, have had numerous clients switch to TW from ATT and never looked back. They aren't as bad as they use to be. Not like when they bought out Comcast 10 years ago.

 

[rrborman]

I have not had internet problems (knock on wood!) but, our television service is a joke. We had FIOS for years and were satisfied until.....April 1.
All the PPV movies are gone, no multi-room DVR, no on demand for channels we pay for and use, and multiple calls to Frontier with similar results, no action.
How hard is this? For a company whose only growth strategy is to buy customers from Verizon and try to switch them over, you'd think they would have figured this out by now. No wonder the street abuses Frontier's stock price.
Inevitable, the company is going to fail anyway because it is a flawed business model. If they had any skill at transitioning customers, they might stand a small chance of surviving. If ifs could be fifths, we'd all be drunk!

 

[Chris_dba]

I got my first bill from Frontier after being transferred from Verizon, and it went up. Called Frontier and ask why and they said they don't have my Verizon bill so they can;t compare.

WHAT A FIASCO!!!!!!!

 

[Mbf310]

In Manhattan Beach, CA, I have had several outages, all fixed without a house call. I was missing some premium channels on TV, and email to letmelindaknow@ftr.com resolved that. But I am still furious that we are stuck with an iOS app lacking all of the convenience features that Verizon offered. I realized that a call to Verizon last month resulted in lowering my 75/75 Internet to 50/50 for the same price, and a 45 minute call to Frontier got nowhere except to learn that 75/75 is not available in CA! Two days ago Nomorobo quit working. I figured out I had to change my provider to Frontier and add a different referral number on my Frontier account. Then I discovered that all calling features had been switched to off in Frontier account, including call waiting. What next? Only notification of the transition was a cheery email from Frontier about a week before.

 

[stevenrix]

Sounds like the house was sold to a new owner but the new owner never got the housekeys and slept outside in the doghouse instead.

 

[pixelpusher220]

Lets take a bit of time to think about that statement.
You're basically giving over your privacy to an inefficient institution that shuts down every other year because the yahoos cannot agree on anything. Capitalism pushes companies to do better than their competitor unless there are no competitors in the area they have a monopoly but that will not last long as other companies will strive to do better.
Bottom line is everything works itself out.

Competition doesn't work when you need to have multiple copies of infrastructure built for each competitor. You have ONE water line to your house. You have ONE electric line to your house. It would be stupid to run multiples of these.

Why aren't ISP networks run the same way? I have FiOS and Comcast available. both have had to run duplicate wires around the entire area for this. That's not 'efficient' at all. And that's with actual 'competition' in place. Or more correctly an Oligarchy.

Physical infrastructure is what's known as a 'natural monopoly' because it doesn't make any economic sense to have duplicate networks. ISPs should be forced to be the same way...just like private electric, water and gas companies are now.

 

[nimbulan]

I've been on Frontier for several years. We used to experience frequent outages (generally an hour a day for several weeks at a time) though usually around midnight. It would happen during the day occasionally, and once for 8 hours. After that stopped, I had a long period of time where I would experience extremely high ping during peak hours (5-9pm or so,) around 140ms to servers I would normally ping 20 to which made online gaming a bit difficult. Lately as they've been increasing service speeds, I've been experiencing a rather severe reduction in bandwidth during peak hours where I only get about 30% of normal since they are apparently overloading their network.

Through all of this, customer service has never been able to provide me with any useful information or help in any way. I never had nearly so many issues with Comcast.

 

[epobirs]

I wouldn't mind seeing internet services becoming a government run service (at least as an alternative). The Internet has become a critical service in the modern world.

Chattanooga appears to be a model pioneering example of city-run (10gbps) internet service. https://epb.com/

Sometimes critical services and capitalism just don't pair well.

There isn't a lot of capitalism of the proper sort in broadband service. Lots of cronyism and government interference enabling it. This doesn't lead to motivated competitors.

 

[cptdread]

If I was a monkey, I still would not want Frontier *servicing* me. I live in the Dallas/Ft Worth Metro area and we had similar issues. Internet went out on Monday, went ahead and scheduled technician for Friday (time frame was 8am to 5pm), called back Tue, Wed, and Thur. On Thu, talking with them, had them reset from their office my ONT (My box would not work by pushing the 2 blue buttons at the same time), internet started working but cable stopped. Friday evening, no technician, called support, same song and dance. Spouse finally got to a supervisor who said "He see's the issue on his end", 2 minutes later, internet speed is back, cable is back, all is working. Technician finally showed on Saturday to get router working again (glad I still had old one).

I still have managers name in case something happens again but, if they did not fix it when they did, I was almost ready to push the "Place Order" button on Time Warner's website (I still shudder at that thought).

Good luck.

 

[Marcus52]

We just got handed over to Frontier by Verizon (Texas), and I live in fear of the result. So far, no issues, I still get higher rates for download and upload than I pay for - but Frontier's record isn't good in the rest of the country.

I will say the AOL email service is better than the Yahoo based service. I feared that change as well, but at this point I'm happy with it.

I really don't understand why Verizon thought it was a good idea to get out of the landline business altogether, sell everything off to Frontier. I can't help but think there is something rotten going on in this whole thing. I'd really like to see the FCC, and whoever else might have a legitimate reason to be involved, look into these dealings.

 

[Khimera2000]

I noticed it when I visited my brother. His speed has dipped to about half of what it was under fios. Not sure whats going on with his connection but ive seen anywhere between 40Mb to 10Mb throughout the day.

 

[memadmax]

I wouldn't mind seeing internet services becoming a government run service (at least as an alternative). The Internet has become a critical service in the modern world.

Chattanooga appears to be a model pioneering example of city-run (10gbps) internet service. https://epb.com/

Sometimes critical services and capitalism just don't pair well.

Frontier just took billions of taxpayer money and this is the result.
Because they didn't have to earn it thru hard lessons it all fell apart...

 

[Headback]

Frontier took over the Florida State on April 1st 2016, I was out of Canle and Internet service for almost 2 weeks, when someone finally showed up to get my service up and running, he has a problem getting my On Demand or Recording to work, he said because of the transition, it will take a few more days, today is April 23rd and it is still not workin, my internet is not working either. I got a bill for $199.97, I thought this was a joke , but when I called billing, it was a real bill. Customer service people are so rude, supervisors are unprofessional. I'm not saying I'm not paying the bill, but it's how much I will be paying. The other cable company her is paying our transfer fee, I might as well go with them. This is crap.

 

[bradschef47]

We live in Dunedin, Fl. and have had Verizon Fios for about 2 yrs. with minimal problems. As soon as Frontier assumed this area the problems started with irritating DVR TV issues (scheduled recordings not recorded, recordings disappearing from saved list, etc.). Now we have intermittent Gmail issues (oops #007 errors) we've never had before, so now our Email is affected. Of course as others know help is non existent, but bull___t lip service is rampant! Frontier has the same runaround that Verizon Fios has when there's an issue. They send you to another department, who sends you to another and another with no resolution. These are things that should levy ISP's with financial penalties for unreasonable service loses customers have to endure! We pay penalties for non payment, so why shouldn't they pay penalties. Responsibility should be required for all parties not just the customer.

 

[Ray_Slayer]

My grandmother was a happy Verizon customer in Tampa. The Tampa market was acquired by Frontier last month. A few days after the transaction her phone service provided over FIOS stopped working. They still can't even determine a root cause, but it seems entire exchanges in her town no longer work. With FCC E911 regulations being what they are, I'm surprised Frontier hasn't been fined out of existence. Leaving an at risk 90+ year old lady without 911 service for nearly 3 weeks now is completely unacceptable!

 

[Mcapozziello66]

We're here in Florida experiencing the same issues. On top of slower internet, phone service that is dropping calls on a landline and horrible customer service. It has been difficult running our business the past month. On top of that they jacked our bill up $25.00. I do everything thru live chat and then print a copy of it for my records. We loved Verizon and in almost 4 years never had a problem. With Frontier daily. Looking for a new provider.

 

[razor512]

Lets take a bit of time to think about that statement.
You're basically giving over your privacy to an inefficient institution that shuts down every other year because the yahoos cannot agree on anything. Capitalism pushes companies to do better than their competitor unless there are no competitors in the area they have a monopoly but that will not last long as other companies will strive to do better.
Bottom line is everything works itself out.

Competition doesn't work when you need to have multiple copies of infrastructure built for each competitor. You have ONE water line to your house. You have ONE electric line to your house. It would be stupid to run multiples of these.

Why aren't ISP networks run the same way? I have FiOS and Comcast available. both have had to run duplicate wires around the entire area for this. That's not 'efficient' at all. And that's with actual 'competition' in place. Or more correctly an Oligarchy.

Physical infrastructure is what's known as a 'natural monopoly' because it doesn't make any economic sense to have duplicate networks. ISPs should be forced to be the same way...just like private electric, water and gas companies are now.

The infrastructure can be shared. For example, in my area, the same physical line will get you either optimum online, or time warner.

With fiber, there is room for even more sharing as we have yet to find the throughput limitations of the physical line. In lap tests, there were cases where they were able to push 36+ terabits per second through a single strand of fiber at a single wavelength, with the limiting factor being the end point equipment. When fiber lines are shared, different companies use different spectrums of light.
The deep sea fiber optic cables are shared between hundreds of companies, providing everything from internet, phone service, and a whole host of other services.

Many state governments have had fiber installed, but much of it remains unused because a lack of competition has caused ISPs to be reluctant to perform any upgrades to their networks. For the area that do use the government installed fiber, there is simply a fee for using the line, which can go to the upkeep of it, at which point multiple ISPs can share the same line

E.g., verizon fios uses 1490nm for download, and 1310nm for upload, another company wanting to use the same lines, can simply use a different wavelength.

You will essentially have a have a service access manager device which will run a bunch of fiber connections, each with a 2.5Gbps download, and 1.2Gbps upload, they will then run that fiber line to a neighborhood, and into a splitter (here is the one near me)
http://i.imgur.com/YxgKagq.jpg

At which point, each ONT will share that line's throughput,

It overall provides a much lower cost distribution system since all of the electronics are located at the end points.

Many people call fiber, the 100 year infrastructure, mainly due to speculation that the throughput handling capability of it is so vast, that it may take 100 years before we even begin to discover the limits of how much data we can push through a strand of glass fiber.

 

[chuggings]

I work in the internet telco sector in my country and the issues you've described are common place it seems across the western world, be it Canada, UK, Australia or the US.

Some words of advice though seeing I've managed teams of personnel responding to faults and disputes for the past twenty years.

1. Learn a word or two in the native language of the out-sourced call center i.e. if their flipino's shoot them a 'Kamusta (pronounced coom us ta) and a good ole 'sal a mat'.

2. Once you've had a few cases logged (which have failed to resolve the matter) ask to be escalated to a senior. You'll get a lot of fight back but stay calm but persistent. Just say that you can't get off the call until you speak to a senior. I had to do this with 8 reps before I got an escalation.

3. log a complaint with the FCC - https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=38824

4, Find the general manager / vice president for the region. Articulate your complaint/dispute on email and send it through to them directly. This people are very isolated and don't deal with customers. But i promise you its a pain in the ass when a customer gets through to them because good god when the big boss comes yellin about a complaint everyone jumps.

5. Stay calm and don't yell at the rep. These poor bastards are earning, especially with the outsourced call centers slave wages. Like literally sweat shop slave labor.

Get on their good sides. Tell them you understand its a hard job, everyone always yelling and that they don't get much help from training or their bosses.

If you use some empathy i promise you it will get you way further then yelling at these poor saps.

 

[StellaWhite]

I have the same story, I currently have no Internet, no cable and no landline, not even a dial tone! ....feeling abondomed!....feeling very frustrated......I too did not get any warning just a letter saying that Frontier was taking over Verizon customers. I have called Frontier and I have been put on hold for long periods of time, I've been hung up on and no call backs in spite giving a call back number and when I finally a peek to someone they say they have no idea when services will be restored......feeling very very fustrated!.....I have called time Warner to switch and they are booked for 2 weeks because of the overwhelming calls they are getting from ppl like me. The thing that upsets me the most is that in the month of March I got double billed, Verizon billed me on March 9th (and had no trouble with taking my money) and I find out that Frontier bills me on March 16th and frontiers customer services found where I was double billed and said they needed to send me to collections because they are the only one that can fix the problem and credit accounts, so they really route me to collections and after being on hold for an hour, collections gives me a stupid story on why the bill is correct and that I need to pay it. Feeling very very frustrated and not knowing what to do! This is so wrong on so many levels....HELP!!!!!

 

[RLCodeJunkie]

My horror story with Frontier is not as bad as the Author but its been pretty bad since they took over. I work from home about 90-100 miles (depending on where you measure the edge) outside of LA, CA. I rely on my internet and speeds to be decent. The only reason I was made aware of the outage was because our electric company performed some random event in my area that had the net result of switching power on and off multiple times in a single night, that fried a good number of the external FIOS boxes (so I was told) but it was still Verizon so I called and they fixed it the very same day (good times) by replacing the box. The tech told me this was happening in a couple of days but it would be all sunshine and rainbows.

(Current speed: speedtest.net [14/22 d/u] - paid speed 50/50)
I don't think I've had a day yet where I'm getting my max speed which under Verizon was a baseline as I often got 10-20% faster speeds up and down. The highest I've measured has been just around of 40% of my subscribed speed, often times during the day I'm getting somewhere around 10-15%. (my speed package is 50/50 as shown above). Then I have these random periods where the network just drops. It'll be out for as short as 5 minutes up to around an hour during the middle of my work day and I'm forced to either work later to make up for it or tether to my cell as a backup. This is horrible service, something I haven't experienced since the early days of TWC internet which has to have been almost (or at least) 20 years ago for me. I am just SOOOOOOOO glad I didn't sign up for a contract (I'd been considering it because of the cost savings).

I had a similar experience with support, waiting almost two hours on hold, being told I called one department when I needed another, being put on hold for transfer, disconnected, calling the other number they gave me, holding for almost another 2 hours only to be told I needed to go back to the first team. I attributed this to the number of customers that were blindsided by the switch and didn't realize until I finally talked to an honest service person that the issue was MUCH larger than just my area and that pretty much every place they took over was having issues. They hadn't finished migrating accounts (this was a conversation almost 2 weeks after the switch happened), they couldn't see packages and deals that were Verizon specific so they couldn't make tweaks to any customer that wanted to change something without giving them the Frontier (aka higher) prices. There were so many issues that they had no idea (or they hadn't let them know I imagine) when they MIGHT be able to get a handle on things.

here we are a month in, if they haven't figured it out by now, I'm guessing its going to be longer than I have patience for. I'm looking at options now. Maybe they do need stricter Govt regulation, it's a bit early for that since it'd punish the good ISP's (if there are any) for the actions of one really inept one.

 

[Martell1977]

I'm in Hesperia, CA and guess I've been fairly lucky. The only outage so far has been the day they were "upgrading", however, according to the letter it would be my internet out from 4am to 4pm. My internet and TV was out for 2 days...However, after the "upgrades" my internet speed has gone from 30/30 to 20/20. Guess they are trying to make up for the fact that I pay for 25/25 and just happened to get 30/30 via Verizon.

I just recently did a live chat (1 hour to get through the queue) with them because I can no longer order premium channels through my TV and my bill showed a $0 balance, then a $355 balance, with no way to see the billing info. Then, while chatting with them and not having made any payment at all, the balance went back to $0.

I know this isn't Frontier, but being dumped onto AOL for email is horrid. The only thing that makes it somewhat Ok is that I use Outlook to get my email so I rarely have to see the Fisher-Price looking monstrosity that is AOL webmail.

 

[INFOMAN]

You should seriously consider getting a #cradlepoint 4G/LTE/XLTE cellular router.

 

[JamesSneed]

This is hapenning around Dallas TX as well. I have a few friends that have had similar issues.

 

[rmszaphod]

Well I had Verizon FIOS business class. Verizon never seemed able to send me a bill, so I don't know the account number. But I payed my bills through the portal, so no problemo. And forproblems Verizon FIOS could find me.

In April I went to pay my bill. That's when I found out. My tested speed has dropped from 100/100 to 100/50...OK for now I suppose. But I have no way to pay my bill. No email or snail mail from Frontier. No way to log in to Frontier's website. I don't know what's going on. I do have my own PFSense router with an ethernet drop, and I run my own DNS off root so, so far so good as far as service. Maybe they'll just forget about me re: billing.... Yeah....I don't think so either....