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Review by Zionikk 
member for 167 days, 27 visits, last login: 70 days ago
updated 155 days ago
 North Baltimore,Wood,OH
 $40 per month Verizon "Internet Always On." "400Kbps instead of 3Mbps" "Not bad, will be much better when they fully deploy VDSL."
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We had no choice but to use Frontier after Verizon sold out. In early 2011 our internet connection was always slow and the connection wasn't reliable at all. It would always disconnect and go out whenever it rained. I called and talked to customer service and they said it was because of an upgrade that they were doing in my area and told me that it wouldn't be complete until around March 2011. I made it through the outages and after March everything seemed to run fine.
Well not everything, my connection was reliable and it stopped going out. But I was paying for 3mb down but was only averaging around 400kb. I tried to get it fixed but they said that my area was congested. I ended up dealing with it until this year, my bill started getting higher and higher so I cancelled the service all together.
Update 12-20-2012:
Decided that I am going to get Frontier again, and I found out that I can now get up to 6Mps. I am also going to get a second connect line. I'm hoping that since I had to do a complete re-order that my speeds will be closer to the advertised ones. I'm not sure though because I'm still using all the old equipment. I will be updating again on the 24th when my internet is actually turned back on.
Also, I seen that a city in my county that is less than 20 miles away from me just recently got VDSL. They can now get speeds from 6-40Mbps. So I emailed the General Manager and he is sending a technician out to my town to see about our community getting VDSL. He even called me after I gave him my number in a second email and we discussed it more.
He seemed very happy that more customers were interested in getting VDSL and I just want to say that he is a great guy!
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Review by SteveJobs
member for 310 days, 112 visits, last login: a few hours ago
lodged 155 days ago
- Flanagan,Livingston,IL
- $70 per month
- (24 month contract)
- " Always on"
- "Slow speeds"
- "Good for people that need always on internet"
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To note, the zip code i entered is a town that is in my county, as I do not want to give my exact location.
We used to be with Verizon, before frontier bought them out and we have seen a great increase in service. We have always been on the 1.5mbps tier until June of this year, when we upgraded to their 3mbps plan. It has been pretty well, my parents reporting that the computer that is bridged via LAN from the router said they have had more problems, but i do not believe them. The extra bandwidth was appreciated, however not enough. The cost is extremely expensive for what we get, as we can get 15mbps on Mediacom for 10 bucks a month. We are unfortunatly locked into a contract, so we can not leave. However, I am severely frustrated at them, as a rural town down the road gets 7mbps internet, while our max is 3. And we live in a much larger town then the town that gets 7mbps. And they have had it before the bonded DSL was announced, also. I see all of these awful stories with frontier, but we have had no issues. The support has always been helpful. I do not like how they charge $85 if the tech steps foot in your home.
We also have our phone service bundled with this, That is 30 bucks a month, We have no complaints here.
I see great potental in frontier once their bonded dsl becomes fully deployed.
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Review by E Man1864
member for 1.1 years, 171 visits, last login: 5 days ago
updated 164 days ago
- Sylvania,Lucas,OH
- $65 per month
 about 4 days- Verizon (ex GTE)
- "It works 24/7, even through a storm, decent speeds"
- "High Ping, Router activation needs a call to Frontier"
- "Decent speeds, gaming is very laggy."
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I started off with Verizon DSL, it was good, then I was switched over to Frontier. In the beginning, it was slow, then in February 2011, I upgraded to the 7.1/768 package (I listed the time it took for the upgrade in the "Days from order to success" column). I get decent speeds, but bad ping. I used to use a Westell 372W router, then they said it was outdated and gave me a Westell 7500. The only time it didn't work was through Summer 2011. Why? First, the storms. Second, I put the line going to the DSL modem/router through a surge protector (don't do that) and I immediately corrected that by connecting it directly to the wall. Here's a recent speed test I did »www.speedtest.net/result/2119025831.png. The phone service is good too.
UPDATE 12-11-12:
The Westell 7500 they gave me last year has given me slower speeds than usual. I still have the 7.1/768 package, but I get speeds like this: »www.speedtest.net/result/2366297310.png all the time. I am about 0.7 miles away from the DSLCO, so I should be able to get their faster speeds. Changed the "Connection Reliability" to 3 because of this. I will update when I get time to order a new modem/router from them.
Comments:
 Zionikk
join:2012-12-08
North Baltimore, OH Reviews:
 ·Frontier Communi..
| Check for Upgrades If you're still with Frontier, you should call to see about any possible upgrades. Because I know that Bowling Green and Sylvania just got upgraded to VDSL recently. You may be able to get up to 25Mbps for residential services and 40Mbps for business.
Bowling Green and Sylvania are just to of the main cities that got upgraded. But they are upgrading in other areas as well. I would definitely look in to it. You might get lucky! | |
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 Review by Smith6612
member for 5.3 years, 2981 visits, last login: a few hours ago
updated 179 days ago
- Sanborn,Niagara,NY
- $45 per month
- about 7 days
- "Tech Support, Uptime, Routing."
- "Throughput can be inconsistent during evening hours. Bit pricey for the speed"
- "May be leaving service in a few months, but it has been reasonably good."
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As indicated in the Bottom line text, I may be leaving the Frontier DSL service after having them for nearly 7 years. I was one of the first customers Frontier had for DSL in the Sanborn, NY area when they first introduced it. 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 was an ADSL2+ 10/100Mbps Wireless G router with a max level of security being WPA. 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) and as a result, many folks jumped ship to Frontier. As a result, while Frontier had DSLAM capacity to add connections, they did not have the bandwidth 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 the Central Office and Rochester, NY. Once the new Fiber was installed, speeds returned to normal again. There was a fiber cut a week after that caused packet loss, however the local techs and phone support have acknowledged an area issue and the fiber cut was eventually fixed by Verizon (who Frontier had to lease Fiber from).
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. The BRAS I route through was recently replaced, which has allowed for more consistent service.
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 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 Cisco BRAS (Edge router) I'm attached to. The new BRAS seems to give me the same problem, but to a lesser extent. This may be due to the Quality of Service rules I have in place which were not effective on the old BRAS (were being completely ignored) but I will have to play around with this a bit more.
As far as the equipment goes, back in the day when Frontier gave 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. Right now I have a Westell 7500 in use on my line, which has been stable and works fine. Frontier now offers Westell 7550s which include Wireless N radios. 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.
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 may or may not have the service to try these upgrades out unfortunately, but I hope they execute this upgrade to the best of their ability and also make full use of all of the equipment. One complaint I also have with Frontier is with the speed they also provide in this area. The line I have is capable of going to speeds much higher than they offer. For example, right now my upload is uncapped for various troubleshooting reasons, with a sync at 896kbps. My download speed remains at 3Mbps after 6+ years of 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, 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 relevant. Leave capping to the wireless providers. Also 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. For what I pay for the service on top of two landlines with Frontier, it's not worth it. 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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 Review by aguypd
member for 5 years, 1962 visits, last login: a few hours ago
updated 181 days ago
- Silver Springs,Wyoming,NY
- $36 per month
- (24 month contract)
- about 7 days
- "First year is free"
- "We lose our connection every time it rains"
- "Switched back to RR"
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(update 2010-09)I am still glad that I switched back to Road Runner. However, my mother still uses Frontier's DSL. She consistenly gets bandwidths around 3.5 Mbs on her 10 Mbs service. The latency is usually around 50 ms. It can be frustrating to work on the computers at her house and attempting to use the Internet, after getting used to Road Runner at home.
We decided to get rid of our telephone service with Frontier, too, and switch to Time Warner's Digital Phone. Frontier wanted to charge us $200 because they said we had entered into a 2 year contract with them for the Telephone service. The two years for the DSL when we had it, ended back in May of 2010, and we never agreed to a 2 year contract, so I guess they just automatically put us on one.
My wife called the service department and complained and the customer service representative, said that they would cancel the $200 charge.
(update)After continuously comparing bandwidth between my mom's dsl with Frontier and our Road Runner connection, the Road Runner connection is always about three times the bandwidth and less than half of the latency.
(update)My mother, who still has Frontier DSL, got hit by lightning. She called Frontier's customer service and told them that she lost the phones and DSL. The service tech came out and got the phones back online, but never checked the DSL. She had to call them again and finally drove an hour to one of their centers, to pick up a new modem.
(update)Forget trying to get anywhere with their customer service. If you tell them you have an issue, only when it is raining and the lines are wet, they will still send a technician the next day, even though the sun is shining and everything is dried out.
(update)Switched back to Road Runner after less than six months with Frontiernet. It was a mistake to ever switch to Frontiernet.
Switched from Time Warner's Road Runner to Frontiernet's 10M DSL with a new plan that the first year is free and the second year is only $30/month and a promise that the 10M was available to our house. This turned out to be a mistake
After having the service for almost a month, we had several problems and tech support was a 45 minute wait on the phone. Technicians came out the next day and found a problem between us and the CO. Our speeds, 3568/374, are better than they were yesterday, 503/260, but not as good as they had been, 4417/376. This definitely is not what they promised us, though.
Apparently, when it rains our connection is unstable. This is terrible. I guess I have to hope for a drought, so I can have a good connection. Because of the bad connections in the wet weather, Frontier keeps throttling back our speed, instead of fixing the actual problem. The latency has really tanked, too. We were getting a latency around 35 ms, but now we are over 80 ms.
Every time it rains, we can look forward to speeds around 500/200 and a latency over 100 ms. It is terrible.
Frontier has released their announcement on their caps, and our speed is down to 95/78 with a latency of 695 ms. Go figure.
After lying to us about the availability of 10M being available in our area and their position on net neutrality, I am not holding our breath about their honesty, that people in their price protection agreement, won't be capped, also.
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Review by nate155
member for 6.6 years, 18 visits, last login: 103 days ago
lodged 197 days ago
- Delta,Millard,UT
- Contract price not specified.
- "Nothing"
- "Everything"
- "Not much choice..."
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We have had Frontier internet for a number of years and like clock work since we have had them can almost guarantee I will have a high latency from 4 pm to 11 pm and all day on Sundays and Saturdays and holidays and im not talking about 150-200 ms I am talking 350-2000 ms they told me 2 months ago they were working on the problem. come to find out they over sold service and they cant support the number of users they have on. not only that their upload speed is capped at 23KBS download avg goes about 110KBS late at night might get 140-150 KBS we were sold as it being a 3mibt connection but I was told the line can't support it though how it can suppose an insane amount of users I don't know they say they have no plan to increase peoples speeds even though a cable company is moving in in 2014-2015 that will offer most users in Town 25mibit for same price If I was in the main 84624 Area I would not sign a contract with this company as I'd wait for cable or go with the wireless alternative
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 Review by asdjf
member for 8.3 years, 640 visits, last login: 99 days ago
updated 216 days ago
- Old Fields,Hardy,WV
- $70 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 18 days
- "Better than satellite"
- "Incompetent, rude and slow"
- "They take advantage of people."
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Let me tell you a story, one of many, of how Frontier is the most horrible ISP there is.
I called to get them to bring up the upload speed to somewhat match what I am paying for (3M/512kbps) because upload at the time was only 200kbps. The next day the speed dropped to 1mbit down/0.1 up. Called tech support and they said that rather than fixing the speed issue, the tech lowered our speed down to the one meg tier because that's "all we are capable of getting", nevermind that we were getting 2.6Mbit/s a couple days ago. Tech support said this was done because we are 20,000 feet from the CO but we are not, it is only 700 feet away as told to me by the CSR when ordering the service.
I go back and forth with them for a while and then they transfer me to customer service's escalation department. They tell me that they can downgrade me to the 1mbit plan but it would be an extra $20 a month. How does that even make sense?? I want the speed fixed and they want to not only put me on a lower speed but charge me more for lower speed. This lady just kept saying that I was getting the speed that I should be getting, that's all that I could be getting. And after telling her again that tech support specifically told me that they downgraded my speed she told me that they will think about sending a tech out. She then went on to threaten me with permanently having no internet service if I complain about the speeds. I am not kidding, this woman actually said that if I kept 'making changes to my account' that I might not end up with service at all. Even though I want them to fix it, not make any changes.. After this exchange I ask for the woman's name, which she refuses to give. I ask her three times, and each time she said have a nice day. Unbelievable.
I have a great many stories like this about this service, like how they cannot find my city on a map and they say it does not show that I have service with them even though I am on the service right now, that this is not their area even though all my neighbors have frontier, about the many times that techs cancelled the install order when they could not be bothered to come to the house.
Comments:
 spewakR.I.P DadkinsPremium
join:2001-08-07
Elk Grove, CA
kudos:1 | wow Nailed it! | |
| | | Reply When you say 0.2M, do you mean MB/s or Mb/s? If you were advertised 512 Kb/s then that equals 0.512 Mb/s or 0.062 MB/s. If you were getting 0.2 MB/s or even 0.1 MB/s then you were indeed getting more than what they offered. | |
| | | | Re: Reply I mean Mbits, Mb/s. | |
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Review by kjpwv
member for 6.5 years, 841 visits, last login: 115 days ago
updated 216 days ago
- Fairmont,Marion,WV
- $44 per month
- (24 month contract)
- about 5 days
- "Local Technicians are awesome, they have done everything in their power to get me a reliable connection"
- "National Customer Support. So bad it's laughable, just absolute iddiots who have no idea what is going on at the field level."
- "If you can fight your way through support and get a local technician, s/he can tell you what is really happening"
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Installed in March 2012, finally writing a review.
I have had a long strange trip with various internet traveling on various radio waves until finally land based DSL came to my door. Well actually I had to drag it to my door kicking and screaming for several months until the National morons finally sent out my hero Brian. My neighbors had had DSL for about a month and I called Frontier multiple times trying to get them to send someone out to see if I could get service, everything including outright begging. On about the 4th or 5th try I finally got someone who was willing to listen, there is service very near by, please for the love of goodness send someone to check it out.
When my new hero arrived he saw that I was at a nexus of exchanges, one way went to the north and Morgantown, the other the south to Fairmont. Out here you can make a choice when you build what exchange they wanted to be on, and the original builder decided to go north which had no service (at the time, they do now 6 months later), but with a little work Brian could reroute me south where service was live. The techs came out on Friday afternoon at about 3pm in the rain and hooked me up and I've been pretty happy since.. but there have been a few hiccups.
For a short periods my internet would only work from 9pm to 9am, then it would disconnect and reconnect every minute or so making it unusable. It took a few calls and almost 5 days to get a technician out, but they were able to find the issue quickly once they were finally dispatched, loose wire at the CO that was making intermittent contact. Again the national level failed me miserable while the local tech took care of business.
All in all my experience is the West Virginia techs are doing everything they can with the garbage Verizon left, and are revealing absolutely no help from above. Compared to HughesNet and Ntelos 3G this connection is beyond fantastic. Highest quality Netflix with little to no buffering, I always max out and exceed (4 and sometimes 5 meg 29ms ping) the speeds I am paying (3/.75) so I'm quite content. Now that I have most of the local techs numbers I don't even deal with the national morons anymore.
The price is right, $44 with all fees, least I've paid for internet in my 7 years out in the sticks.
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Review by slopoke
member for 1 year, 29 visits, last login: 4 days ago
updated 217 days ago
- London,Madison,OH
- $29 per month
- (24 month contract)
- about 1 days
- "Always On, Wireless Strong, Mostly Consistant."
- "Congestion when the School Buses empty and kiddies online."
- "Rural area with DSL. At least we have broadband."
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After we changed from Verizon DSL; things went without a hitch. Had a couple bumps when contract renewed, but got that fixed. Our 'road' guys are great, friendly guys who help you get everything up to par. Small town in NoHio on line. We have Nextel Modems. Excellent wireless signal. Good advertised speeds except when the homework starts, till about midnite. Normal. Don't really use Yahoo much but the mail is good. Keeps you posted. Fair on-line support. Better getting help Here at BBR. Good site. We good.
Update: Still good. Been 'on' 166 days without a drop. Speed has improved with local updates to equipment. Road guys are great. Cruise by to see if things are good. Could get cable (TW) but they want thousands to run cable back to farm. For an extrra 3Ms don't think so. People have problems but Frontier has been good here.
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Review by joshuaryback
member for 225 days, 0 visits, last login: 225 days ago
updated 225 days ago
- Williamston,Ingham,MI
- $50 per month
- (12 month contract)
- "Quick installation"
- "Im supposed to be getting 7.1MbPs down. and barely getting 1.3 down"
- "getting sick of it"
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Well Long story short....
i just moved to Williamston Michigan, and unfortunately frontier was the only option.
coming from 100MBPs/50MBPS from charter to 7.1 MBPS/768 from Frontier sounded okay to me. I just wanted to watch netflix after work every night.
But.... i cant even do that it seems. im suppose to be getting at least 7.1/768 from them and im barely getting 1.3MBPS. down. Im only about 500 feet from CO so i just dont understand this. and latency is tops 156ms every night. The lowest i've seen it is 84ms so far.
My guess to the problem is over congested CO. maybe install another CO Frontier?
But hey ill give it a chance, ive only had it 5 days now so we will see. but its just frustrating because i cant watch anything when the screen is all pix-elated :/ and of course there the only option in town after charter left the city about a year ago.
And i dont think its my lines since the tech installed brand spanking new ones, to the house and in the house.
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| | slow speedsIf you are that close and having those speeds THey need to run loopcare on your line, if report trouble on your line and they should test it. Ask the technician to run loopcare test on your line and verify how long your cabel pair is testing.. It could be and likely is there is what is caleld a sideleg on your cable pair. Which means there is an extra ammount of wire on your line that needs cut off. shoudl take care of it. | |
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