My Frontier Experience

I am of mixed opinion on my FrontierNet Internet service.

Equipment

Frontier provided a Siemens Gigaset SE567 modem, which proved to be substandard. It fairly regularly (every other week or so) goes off into la-la land, sometimes forgetting how to speak wireless, othertimes forgetting how to speak DSL. On two occasions over a two-year period, it shit its configuration file and completely hosed itself when power cycled to correct the problem. The Gigaset is awkward to set up but possibly contains some powerful firewall settings. It negotiated a line speed of 3.7 Mbps.

The line is set up as PPPoE, which is standard. Noting the VPI/VCI settings in the Gigaset and entering them into other modems, I found it easy to set up my own modem. Two alternatives (a AT&T branded 2Wire and a Netgear DGND3300) both negotiated improved lines speeds of 5.1 Mbps, although the 2Wire was unable to maintain ADSL sync and causing periodic service interruptions (though given a few minutes, it rectified these itself—unlike the Gigaset). The Netgear performs reliably (the first full month I owned it, March 2011, it reported 100% uptime without losing sync once).

Network Performance

Frontier advertises DSL as 10 Mbps. Located about 1.5 miles from the end office, their modem negotiated at 3.7 Mbps, and I was able to get this up to 5.1 Mbps by replacing it with my own (though my reason was more because of its unreliability than speed: 3.7 Mbps would have kept me happy). Actual throughput seems to vary: typically, performance is more in the 1-2 Mbps area, but some high-bandwidth activities (downloading a Linux distro with BitTorrent or from Usenet via a paid NNTP service) can perform quite nicely.1 

Frontier imposes DSL hijacking2 , so incorrectly typed domain names result in redirection to a Frontier search server, or even sent straight to a shopping site, instead of the proper "NXDOMAIN" response. This is a security problem and a nuisance for scripting purposes. Time Warner implements the same feature, but allows it to be properly disabled; in the Frontier version of "disabled" they still return the forged DNS response, but their server generates a faux "404 Page not found". I use dnsmasq to weed out their problem responses.

Service

Frontier's service quality varies; sometimes they are helpful, sometimes useless.

Complaining about the flakeyness of the Gigaset modem, for example, was futile: if it wasn't working, they demanded I reboot it; once it started working, they were done. They would not do anything to rectify the inherent unreliability of the device, and if it required periodic rebooting, that was okay.

When complaining about performance, they sent line technicians to my house to check the local loop. Unfortunately this didn't solve much, since the congestion was in their downtown data center. After collecting and submitting a week's worth of data showing time-of-day related performance issues, they sent another tech to my house. It was nice to have a human to interact with about the problem, although he just called downtown and got them to fix something down there. This seems inefficient, but it got the job done.

Billing

The real frustration in Frontier's service is the billing. Time Warner, the competition, sets all-inclusive rates and sticks with them. There is no question or debate about what the cost is. With Frontier, the rate they charge is completely incomprehensible and unpredictable.

Frontier offers one rate, but you can only get that with a phone line. The cost of just the DSL line is more than with a metered phone line. The phone line has all sorts of taxes and surcharges, which they don't include up-front. They charge me an extra $4.50 each month for the modem, necessary for the service, over and above the $29.95 line fee; even though I returned it to them, their billing system doesn't have this as an option so each month they charge me $4.50 (and some taxes, I think) for the modem I don't have and then credit me $5.00 for not having it.

Annually, the rates go up and/or credits terminate so the total cost goes up to a price higher than Time Warner's rates. If I used the phone line, this might be okay, but since I don't, it's not an acceptable price. So each year, I have to call them and badger them into putting it back down to where it was in the first place—only a few dollars less than Time Warner's price.

I understand some of the confusion is created by taxes and fees imposed on phone companies that cable companies haven't traditionally paid. Frontier could lump all that together and talk in the bottom line numbers up-front if they wanted to. Instead, however, I think they want to make their service sound like a great deal so they talk in their fees only, neglecting taxes, regulatory, and equipment fees until the bill shows up. Then the customer feels shafted because the cost is $57 instead of $38, but it's too late because there's a contract period or it's too much hassle to change.