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Review by techguytn See Profile

  • Location: Powell, Knox, TN, USA
  • Cost: $60 per month (24 month contract)
  • Install: about 6 days
  • No Cap
The internet connection is really reliable
Bunch of outsourced air heads answering the support phone
Good net if you know how to do your own trouble shooting.
Pre Sales information:
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Value for money:

I have a double bonded connection via Arris NVG443B, after changing to google dns servers I (knock on wood) don't ever really have any downtime other than the occasional drops.

member for 5.9 years, 20 visits, last login: 5 years ago
lodged 5.9 years ago







Review by Beart961 See Profile

  • Location: Woodland, Cowlitz, WA, USA
  • Cost: $65 per month (12 month contract)
  • Install: about 7 days
Installed as promised.
Is a bit slow 41 versus 45 megabit not a big issue to us.
Ok for the money and I do not have to deal with Comcast.
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The 45/6 megabit is new to this area and had a few wrinkles.
They did not install new equipment but used our existing F2250 over the existing single pair.
Ordering and installation was done quickly and professionally.
Frontier has always been easy to deal with here.
NOW for the problem. First Frontier supplied good equipment, good installation and did not need to be called.
The problem was with amature radio signals causing the F2250 to drop connection. It did not happen till the speed increase.
PLEASE NOTE the amature station is operating as licensed by the FCC.(It is mine and is maintained per my license.)
The F2250 is a part 15 device and must deal with licensed transmitters itself.(FCC regulations usually printed in the front of the equipments manual.)
In this case I used a Biggest clamp-on, mix 31 ferrite core on the input cable.(From kf7p.com)
Nine turns did the trick and no more RFI. The legitimate signal was not affected by the core.

member for 6.1 years, 18 visits, last login: 5.2 years ago
updated 6 years ago

ham3843
join:2015-01-15
USA

ham3843

Member

Wow....excellent details about how you solved a tricky problem!

I'm not in the Frontier footprint, but I really appreciate your explanation of how you solved ham signal interference on your gateway /router with the exact type of ferrite choke needed.
Impressive. You know your stuff. Thanks.

If you have any tips on where I can learn more about the various ferrite material mixtures and how they block certain interferences please let me know where!
Beart961
join:2018-02-11
Woodland, WA

1 recommendation

Beart961

Member

Re: Wow....excellent details about how you solved a tricky problem!

Look in the kf7p.com tech section toward the bottom. There is a number of good references there. K9YC’s A Ham's Guide to RFI, Ferrites, Baluns, and Audio Interfacing is a good one. As the site points out pay attention to chapter 7!
Good Luck

Review by bandrp See Profile

  • Location: Bluefield, Mercer, WV, USA
  • Cost: $54 per month
  • Install: about 1 days
fast service, courteous, and great knowledge, don't like the fact that I have to purchase phone to get internet.
goes out sometimes, but which isp doesn't?
very good service and support
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I have the fastest dsl available to me. 25mb down, and 1.5 up.
Have had very good results with frontier and will stay with them.
I am not a new member of DSLreports.
I was very sick and was offline for over a year and didn't log on so
I opened a new accout.


member for 9.9 years, 125 visits, last login: 1.6 years ago
updated 6 years ago


Kyle
@spcsdns.net

Kyle

Anon

Horrible

Internet goes out consistently and although the tech support is friendly they schedule a tech to come out and reschedule 2-3 times! Been without internet for three days now.
bumpski
Premium Member
join:2015-09-13
Springville, PA

bumpski

Premium Member

$54 a month

I assume $54 is just for internet and not the phone?
Can I ask what your total bill is?
I'm not totally sure you have to have the phone, but in the past for me, Frontier certainly insisted upon it. I think they may be misleading us regarding the actual requirements.






Review by ghess71 See Profile

  • Location: Hillsboro, Washington, OR, USA
  • Cost: $211 per month
  • No Cap
Consistent speeds. Lots of sports channels
HD DVR software is clunky
Still love them
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Been with Frontier for almost 8 years now since Verizon sold their rights to them. Have had a couple issues over the years, but most fixed quickly. Their Chat customer service far exceeds their call in customer service.

member for 6.4 years, 2 visits, last login: 6.1 years ago
lodged 6.4 years ago


Anone92ff
@att.net

Anone92ff

Anon

Drop Frontier

Frontier Vantage internet connection really sucks, you can't count on a steady high speed, have trouble at times trying to watch videos and I just found yesterday that my Cable company offers internet for the same price only difference is cable download speed is more than 5 times faster and upload speed over 25 times faster all for the same price. I had no idea Frontier was that much of a rip off, they are overpriced for low quality internet.






Review by Ztoo22 See Profile

  • Location: Waterloo, De Kalb, IN, USA
  • Cost: $38 per month
  • No Cap
Very reliable
Slow (6.6/.55 mb/s)
Good value DSL
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I have Frontier Simply Broadband Max DSL service. We pay full price of close to $40, and have for several years.

The modem provided to me is a Netgear 7750. It is combined modem, router, and access points.

We have had good experiences with Frontier and their tech support.

The main thing I wish Frontier offered is fast upload speeds. I get 768 kb/s upload, and so video conferencing is difficult.

member for 6.6 years, 189 visits, last login: 218 days ago
lodged 6.6 years ago


Review by gbogdanoff See Profile

  • Location: Fairfield, Spokane, WA, USA
  • Cost: $49 per month
  • Install: about 7 days
everything works as expected. stable and reliable
no problems at all
i have had bad experiences with Frontier in the past, but here in north-eastern rural Washington State, they have been great.
Pre Sales information:
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i was very uneasy about contacting Frontier for service, but their dsl service(up to 24meg) in this area is actually as fast as it gets. 24meg is for areas that have two lines available, i only have one, but they still got me 18meg. previously i had cellular internet service through Cougar Wireless, and although i paid for 20meg up and 6 meg down, i rarely got better than 12meg up and 6meg down. Frontier was 1/3 the price and i get 18meg up and 1.25 meg down(15meg up and 1 meg down via speedtest, which is 80% of expected speed, right on the money) consistently and flawlessly. my biggest problem with Frontier is that i had signed up for FIOS service last year at a previous address in Long Beach CA, and after a month and a half, they still couldn't figure out how to get to my house and activate service for the equipment that Verizon had left behind. service was cancelled 3 times with no installation before i gave up.

here in Spokane county, however, a service tech was scheduled quickly, he showed up on time(early!) and did a great job with the install. service is very friendly, local and personal here. i am very happy.

member for 12.9 years, 375 visits, last login: 6.7 years ago
updated 6.7 years ago


Review by klipko See Profile

  • Location: Portland, Washington, OR, USA
  • Cost: $50 per month
  • Install: about 1 days
Service reliability, consistant speed (in my area), (somewhat) price
Symmetrical plans, a little cheaper than Comcast.
Sticking with Frontier. Comcast doesn't offer anything better.
Pre Sales information:
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..:: Aug-2010 ::..

158.00...give or take a few cents for long / short months. That includes:

* home phone
* internet (35 Mbit / 35 Mbit)
* TV
- MR-DVR (multi-room HD DVR box)
- HD-box
* all taxes

Been happy with the service even through the changeover to Frontier from Verizon. Fact I moved the service twice during the transition and billing charges were correct and service wasn't interrupted. Not bad.

Only down fall was the three (yes "3") Frontier contractors came to install service at my new house within 15 minutes. One for each bundled service according to their work orders. They worked it out, two stayed while the third went to his next install.

They used existing coax since the house had FiOS service before so the whole install took about 1 hour. They made sure that all channels, multi-room DVR, internet and phone was all functional before leaving.

Regarding Frontier shutting down TV service...they haven't fully said that it's going to happen but anybody can read between the lines and see the current actions the company has taken as a sign. I plan on keeping the service till it ends. After that, not sure if going OTA w/ Tivo or sign up with satellite.

Install took place in Aug 2010...just now getting around to write about it.

Good: 35 Mbit symmetrical Internet connection, 100+ HD channels, PQ
Bad: bad install coordination between Frontier and sub-contractors used
Bottom line: better value than the local cable operator

..:: 16-Feb-2015 ::..

Well Frontier never did shutdown FiOS TV service but some components did stop, like being able to adjust services online (you have to call now) and remote DVR capabilities. Over all the service has been pretty good and for the 4 years (after the Verizon selloff) my bill did go up $20 over the years for a monthly total of 175.xx but in September 2014 we decided to cancel TV and phone and go with Tivo and Ooma. We average about 10 hours of TV a week and about 95% of it can be captured from OTA, the rest with Netflix/Amazon Prime. The other bump was Frontier changed their FiOS plans to 30/5 ($34.99), 50/10 ($49.99) and 100/15 ($79.99) at around the same time so that put the nail in the coffin for TV and Phone service. I hated to lose the symmetrical 35/35 Internet service but we are getting by with the 30/5 plain and saving roughly $115 a month (Tivo and Ooma service factored in). (Can save $5.00 more if signed up for autopay for any of the plans.)

Today (16-Feb-2015) I did experience our first outage. Call Tech Support, very helpful, took about 45 minutes being on the phone with them. Issue was on their end and when pressed for what was the cause the tech said that they just had to do "some configuring on their stuff". (What ever that means.)

Other thoughts. We had a $250 ish credit when canceling TV and Phone so when that pot drys up I'm planning on bumping our internet to the middle tier (50/10).

Wish List:
* more control over account (change service, etc.)
* Increase upload bandwidth
* Really distance themselves from Comcast in Internet plans and price. Mainly plans.

..:: 2017 - Winter (Jan or Feb) ::..

Lost internet. Traced problem to the power supply to the ONT. 4 day wait till a tech could come out to fix. Ugh. During that time, I tried everything in my power (and tool cabinet) to jerry rigged something but couldn't get it to power back on. (Dark times without internet.) Once the tech came, she swapped only the Power Unit. Service back on but now I lost the extra upload padding. Was 50/20, now 50/10...which is what my service is to being with but I miss that extra 10Mbps.

..:: 1-May-2017 ::..

Short outage between 4:30 - 8:30 PM.

During that time I power cycled the Router, ONT to no solution. Called support, waiting on hold for 53 minutes before hanging up. Called again around 7:00, got a recording that there was an outage in Gresham (nowhere near me). Service came back online sometime around 8:30 PM.


member for 17.7 years, 2795 visits, last login: 2 years ago
updated 6.9 years ago


Review by zolotkey See Profile

  • Location: Hillsboro, Washington, OR, USA
  • Cost: $70 per month (12 month contract)
  • Install: about 7 days
  • No Cap
Low ping, No Data Caps, symmetrical connection
Peering issues to Netflix at the start of connection
Good connection otherwise
Pre Sales information:
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Value for money:

I ordered the 100/100Mbps tier. The ordering was easy but was charged for something that I was not interested in but thought was free from what the phone rep during setup. The install process was a breeze. I already wired up the housing end so the install rep just had to plug it into the ONT box. It was setup in about 15 minutes. Install was free and painless. I noticed the billing issue as stated before on my first bill. I was able to call support and get the charges taken off easy. The Phone rep was nice and very fast.

member for 6.9 years, 39 visits, last login: 4.8 years ago
lodged 6.9 years ago


Review by ghamden See Profile

  • Location: Lerona, Mercer, WV, USA
  • Cost: $45 per month
  • Install: about 5 days
  • No Cap
So far it is great
no so far
I gave them a second chance and so far it was a good decision
Pre Sales information:
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I was a Frontier customer for years and the service was terrible it never worked fought them for years\.

I canceled their service 2 years ago, i just recently was informed they had fixed their issues in my area so i gave them a try again what a difference i now 24 meg service with no issues so far it has only been a month. But i am very optimistic, The installer preformed a very professional job

member for 21.7 years, 126 visits, last login: 7.1 years ago
updated 7.1 years ago

Rye93
join:2008-05-15
Centerville, NY

Rye93

Member

Hate this company, have for 45 years!

This company serves rural areas almost exclusively. I live in a township of about 700 people in rural NY state. Citizens Communications/Frontiernet keeps these usually lower middle class areas isolated from even connecting to towns half a mile away without long distance charges. I can only call within my three digit dialing number for free.

There is no cable available where I live. Citizens Communications/Frontiernet has a policy of never allowing even other dial-up ISPs, such as LocalNet, NetZeo & PeoplePC into its insulated territory. And Citizens' is a monopoly, which is allowed to charge usuary prices for, way too often, poor service.

For years, I've written to the FCC, PSC, Federal/state/local elected representatives. I receive no response, even when I can explain that lack of choices, and prove that Verizon provides DSL for $12.95 a quarter mile to my west, east, and south. Disadvantaged people have no political clout, and I'm sure that Citizens Communications/Frontiernet is very aware of that fact.

I use my phone/DSL for 6 mos a year. Can I put these services "on vacation," (suspend) them for the 6 months I'm not in residence? Of course not. Which makes my $30. DSL plus phone charges pretty damned expensive per month for the six months that I actually use them. My AT&T in FL is happy (after a go-round with the retention dept.) to do it for the time I'm not there; a nominal fee for keeping the phone acct open, total suspension of DSL service is free.

Check out Citizens Communications/Frontiernet's corporate hierarchy, their salaries, the corporate profits. These obscene sums are gleaned from the pockets of people with no choices. Is this some new kind of good old American Way? In these years of big business/government kissy-kiss, it sure is.
jyhade
join:2008-05-23
Deloit, IA

jyhade

Member

god this is nuts

believe me ur not kidding about the crap service either! thank god im a networking engineer because the whole area here in eastern IA has been so screwed up for the last week its been Absolutely PATHETIC! when i say DSL service its been slower than DIALUP! the Tech service is Nonexistant and the only way i got anything done was call in a few numbers to get something done. ive NEVER had this much trouble with ANY other ISP! i just hope for everyone elses sake they can find a Better tech support help or networking guru cause this has been horrable!

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:

My Other Reviews

·Charter
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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member for 16.1 years, 8713 visits, last login: a few hours ago
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
Ubee EU2251
Ubiquiti UAP-IW-HD
Ubiquiti UniFi AP-AC-HD

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
Ubiquiti UAP-IW-HD
Ubiquiti UniFi AP-AC-HD

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
R.I.P Dadkins
Premium Member
join:2001-08-07
Elk Grove, CA
·Consolidated Com..

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
Ubiquiti UniFi AP-AC-HD

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.