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Review by Smith6612 See Profile

  • Location: Sanborn, Niagara, NY, USA
  • Cost: $45 per month
  • Install: about 7 days
  • No Cap
Tech Support, Uptime, Routing.
Throughput can be inconsistent during evening hours. Linear-seeming network.
No longer a Frontier customer, but they've been good.
Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

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I am no longer a Frontier DSL customer. As a parting note, Frontier was very rarely down for me. The only outages I ever encountered was a PPPoA outage which lasted for a few hours, and an outage which was caused by lightning frying a modem.

I was one of the first customers Frontier had for DSL in the Sanborn, NY area when DSL was introduced. The speeds for Frontier Max, the plan I have always subscribed to, began at 1Mbps/128kbps and later on increased to 3Mbps/384kbps a few weeks later as Frontier began to establish their network in the area. The supplied modem was the Speedstream 6520 which is an ADSL2+ 10/100Mbps Wireless G Gateway. The service when it was first connected was awesome. I saw my speeds day and night and it was pretty much reliable. Occasionally when Frontier was having backbone issues I would see a night time slowdown, and support was typically aware of it and willing to file a ticket for 1.5Mbps on a 3Mbps line.

Towards the second and third year of service, Frontier started to have an influx of customers in this area as a result of the trouble going on with the Cable company (Adelphia). As a result, while Frontier had DSLAM capacity to add connections, they did not have the capacity backing up everything at night and as a result, speeds would suffer. It took Frontier a few months to resolve this as it was local, and this was simply a fiber optic upgrade between Central Offices. Once the new Fiber was turned up, speeds returned to normal again. There was a fiber cut a week after which caused packet loss, however the local techs and phone support acknowledged an area issue and the fiber cut was eventually fixed a day later.

Fast forward to more recent events, I've noticed an increase in congestion on the service being caused from the transit in and around the Rochester area, in addition to the transit going to Ashburn, Virginia which is where Frontier has a key POP for peering with other providers. While my slowdowns are no longer local, they happen at various times of the evening and also on various days. Some days the service is consistent, other days it can be as low as 700kbps to most sites and a rollercoaster at that. Gaming performance also deteriorates during this time, with an increase in latency, loss, and jitter. Some latency increases were attributed to the gear in Rochester I must route through (BRAS, Switches, Fiber Ring) being congested which Frontier has been slowly addressing, but not as quick as they should be.

One issue I do have with the service is with my ability to download and upload at the same time. I've done some research, and while we haven't settled on an exact reason for this, whenever I max my download out and attempt to run an upload at full speed my line takes a massive hit on the download. My download also takes a hit when I upload at a very minimal amount as well (for example, downloading at 390KB/s, could upload an additional 2KB/s and my download speed will drop by 100KB/s). Based on what I've found out, this may be due to the old DSLAM I'm attached to, but more than likely it was due to the BRAS (Edge router) I'm attached to. This may be due to the Quality of Service rules I have in place, but I have not been able to get this to perform as I'd like.

As far as the equipment goes, back when Frontier used to give out Siemems modems, they were well known to play up with gaming consoles. They were reliable and stable, with the SE567 giving some pretty good Wireless range, but it was often desired to bridge the modem or replace it with something else. My last modem was a Westell 7500, which has been stable and works fine. Frontier has since moved on to newer units with feature Wireless N support. I'm glad Frontier has moved away from the Siemens modems and has started moving towards Linux-based units. This will, hopefully, allow for far more flexibility with their gear. I've certainly noticed a huge improvement in stability.

The last thing I'd like to mention is that Frontier is now upgrading gear in this area, a much needed upgrade with newer ADSL2+ and VDSL2 gear capable of delivering some better speeds. Some of these upgrades include ADSL2+ bonding on the physical aspects, so there's nothing fancy such as MLPPP being used. I hope they execute this upgrade to the best of their ability and also make full use of all of the equipment. A complaint I have held for years with Frontier is with the speed they also provide in this area. My download speed remains at 3Mbps after 7+ years of service, and the upload was stuck at 384kbps up until the final year of my service. From what I have been able to obtain, the gear Frontier has is very capable of going faster but due to non-technical reasons they will not turn up the speed higher even on the old gear. I won't elaborate on this for various reasons but I really hope they reconsider now that the cable company in this area has some ridiculous speeds and aren't that much more expensive.

Some of you may also wonder why I didn't mention data limits or modem rental fees. I'm not for Frontier trying to cap their users like they've been trying to do for a while in some regions, first starting off at 5GB and then booting higher than average users. They haven't enforced caps in my area yet and I'm glad they haven't. It's not the right direction to go down in a modern Internet if they wish to stay in the wireline ISP business. Leave capping to the wireless providers. Also for the modem rental fees, word has it Frontier is doing away with them. I have never paid a modem rental fee and I have found ways around paying it when I swapped modems to Frontier-supported units. DSL modems are cheap things, and are paid off with a few months of service. Plus, if I ever need support I'd rather not have them blame my modem.

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updated 7.2 years ago


a guy pd
average - nothing special
join:2008-05-08
Silver Springs, NY
·Charter
ARRIS SB6190
Ooma Telo

a guy pd

Member

I wish their service was more uniform

I am glad that you have had good luck with the connection about in Niagara County, but unfortunately, in Wyoming County, their infrastructure is lacking and they don't seem to have the resources to fix it.
When I signed up for their DSL, I was told that I should be able to get their 10mbs service and that at my location, I should be pretty close to full speed.
Unfortunately, on a good day, I get only about 3.8mbps and if it rains, the service degrades considerably.

Smith6612
MVM
join:2008-02-01
North Tonawanda, NY
·Charter
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Smith6612

MVM

Re: I wish their service was more uniform

Hey, thanks for the reply! In your case it sounds like your issue is involving old copper or distance from the RT/CO. This connection that I reviewed is actually on the limits of Frontier's service in Sanborn, as only a few houses over, Verizon takes over where there is no DSL. The wire that Frontier has is pretty small, but it does have a high gauge rating so it's kept the DSL working and synced at a pretty high SNR even through storms. So far a few people from this same street have gotten Frontier DSL after me and my relative told them about it, and they've seen the same consistancy as well. My relatives were Frontier's first DSL customer in the area anyways from what the tech had said, as after all the moment they moved DSL in and turned it on was the day my relative called up and ordered it.

a guy pd
average - nothing special
join:2008-05-08
Silver Springs, NY

a guy pd

Member

Re: I wish their service was more uniform

I just sent an e-mail to Frontier, asking if they would waive their ETF, if we cancelled, since we have a bad connection here. We will see what they have to say.
Plus, if they start to enforce the 5GB cap, we would use that in less than a week.

Smith6612
MVM
join:2008-02-01
North Tonawanda, NY
·Charter
Ubee EU2251
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1 edit

Smith6612

MVM

Re: I wish their service was more uniform

You can say that again. Steam alone last week on my Verizon connecion burned through 6GB worth of data with almost 3 days of maxing the download out (768k lol) just to reinstall some games and download updates for them from Steam. Seeing as though games these days are becoming very big along with the updates, the gamers for sure won't be too happy. I just hope Frontier doesn't implement the caps or at least keep them this low as they're proposing, as I'd hate to lower their ranking on this review just because of a cap.

spewak
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Elk Grove, CA
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spewak

Premium Member

Re: I wish their service was more uniform

said by Smith6612:

I just hope Frontier doesn't implement the caps or at least keep them this low as they're proposing, as I'd hate to lower their ranking on this review just because of a cap.
Smith,
What would you do if Frontier does lower the caps to the intended and publicized 5gig a month? I was reading that maybe the Term committed subs will be cap free.

Smith6612
MVM
join:2008-02-01
North Tonawanda, NY
·Charter
Ubee EU2251
Ubiquiti UAP-IW-HD
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3 edits

2 recommendations

Smith6612

MVM

Re: I wish their service was more uniform

Ultimately, I don't know really. I would call them up and ask them what is going on and how much they are charging per extra GB, and then ask them why they wanted caps in the first place. Really, Frontier's infrustructure and backbones are sound, no bottlenecks in there, but if anything, the slow downs are because of either your line losing sync, or because of a local bandwidth squeeze. Now, running trace routes from the Frontier connection, I'm pulling some very good pings and stable data streams over Frontier's network, even to the other side of the US in California.

Honestly, I'd just have to say that whoever wanted this cap is trying to get people angry, as caps aren't going to stop bandwidth crunches. When the caps are reset, you get more bandwidth crunching. Any person who knows a thing about offering internet speeds is to serve areas with at least an OC-3 (150Mbps symm), and that's what Frontier needs to do and stop using T1's and T3s to fuel areas unless it's THAT rural.

DSL was also not meant to be a capped service, nor was Cable for that matter. Basically, it's meant to have unlimited amount of usage in a sense, but have your speed capped via provisioning. Cable modems, sure you can hack them to get the max bandwidth for your area, but DSL, there's no way you can fiddle with the sync as that's done on the CO/RT side, and considering the way DSL works, if there was a way to mess with your sync rate to make it higher than you pay for like cable, there's no way you'd be able to max out an OC-3 or a T3 line for that matter unless you're on VDSL simply because many customers are just that far away, even on ADSL2+.

Frontier's chance at competing with cable, especially Time Warner and Comcast IS their UNCAPPED DSL product, while slower and maybe more unstable on crappy/long phone lines, having no caps will surely charge their DSL beyond cable when the cable companies cap their users. And as someone on this site stated before, you are paying to be provisioned/capped at a certain speed, not paying to have a certain speed AND data caps. The only reason Frontier should cap would be if they let everyone get the max line sync possible for their DSL line (which means uncapped speed, basically sync as high as it can go stabally) and say they can use as much speed as they can get.