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Review by Doug Huffman See Profile

  • Location: Washington Island, Door, WI, USA
  • Cost: $80 per month (12 month contract)
  • Install: about 1 days
Responsive, available, huge infrastructure investment locally
Some unavoidable service distuptions
Vast improvement over BPL and Satellite ISP
Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

I live on an isolated and rural Island, "like living in the Forties or Fifties." We struggled with unreliable, slow and expensive internet connectivity until Frontier HSI arrived to fill the vacuum left by the demise of IBEC BPL and Satellite ISP's changed business plan.

One day my satellite connection worked fine and the next day it did not, with no believable explanation from the provider. I cancelled and called Frontier and one business day later I was back on line. Frontier has been keeping many trucks and crew on the Island as they reconfigure and improve the infrastructure left by IBEC.

The work entails unavoidable outages, but they have been more tolerable even than the outages suffered with the mature and stable satellite ISP.

Our package is wireline telephone and the lowest data speed for ~$50 + 30 for 12 months. When the area installation is complete then other options may become available. For now about a thousand customers are sharing a microwave link to the mainland - our bottleneck.

The provided equipment is a NETGEAR 7550 modem-router and NO - ZERO - configuration or capability documentation, a pig in a poke. It has worked fine for about a month now. The visiting technicians configure it by remote control with apparently minimal training on the particular device.

When I have complained about outages, the remote CSRs are very inexperienced (one clearly had to put down his doobie to take the call), but the local technicians are prompt, pleasant and over worked..

member for 16.6 years, 378 visits, last login: 69 days ago
updated 7.5 years ago