Review by Drone6076 
UPDATED: 83 days ago
member for 182 days, 6 visits, last login: 83 days ago
 Moab,Grand,UT
 $134 per month
 about 7 days
 "The only broadband game in town."
 "Frontier plays the contract game and jack up prices incrementally."
 "The devil is in the details!"
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(ratings match consensus)
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I have a two year contract for digital phone service and high speed internet.
Pro: Rather idiot-proof interfaces and setup - great for non-tech people or the elderly.
Pro: Local techs and installers are top-notch and very professional.
Pro: Customer service is excellent and polite, but have to be cut-throat in these hard economic times.
Con: Frontier speeds fluctuate greatly. Some times of the day it seems congested and sluggish hovering around 400kbps and at other times it can reach close to 3mb. Upload in rural areas is always significantly worse, which is due to infrastructure issues and oversold bandwidth.
Con: Frontier redirects your DNS lookups to Yahoo search. In rural areas your DNS servers will be physically far away, which slows down every single webpage load.
Con: Frontier's homepage and webmail is My Yahoo.
Con: Frontier charges you rent for a modem which you can never pay off. In one year of dishing out $5.99 a month you could have bought a-top-of-the-line router with all the bells & whistles rather than the siemens rebranded gateway forced on you by Frontier. The supplied modem is a SE567 which is extremely easy for war-drivers and freeloaders to break into and steal your signal or sniff your traffic. In rural parts of Utah, Frontier techs on the other side of the country can telnet right into your gateway bypassing all the security settings. You can bridge the modem to a third-party router but Frontier does not support this and offers no technical support or documentation.
Con: Frontier plays the contract game many cellphone providers have been sued over in recent years. If you sign up for a $70 a month contract, be prepared for close to $20 in taxes and the modem rental fee knocking it up around $95. Frontier will not tell you how much you will be paying in taxes as per their policy. When your contract expires, rather than offering you a promotional contract to get you signed back up, they jack up the rates. For bundled long-distance and ADSL my current rate is $133.99
If you end up having to go with Frontier, ask the techs to put the phone line and the ADSL lines on separate runs - this will greatly improve your latency and upload speed, and might save you the hassle of having to use line filters. Also, make sure that if you are using wireless phones that they are not on the 2.4GHz spectrum because it will degrade your wifi signal.
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