said by cyrus360:...the problem was due to the many massive blizzards my town had experienced the last few months...
...a serious problem in the midwest...
...a problem on their end requiring massive upgrades which took several months to get in place...
All incorrect.
I am pretty sure it's on their end though. What do you guys think?
Yes, the problem is on Frontier's side. There is significant congestion on the circuits that feed your office from the state aggregation pop during peak usage hours.
The crazy thing is, this problem starts right at 8pm exactly every night. They keep blaming congestion in the lines at "prime time" hours. I asked how is 11:30pm on a Tuesday prime time because I would think any time on Saturday and Sunday would be a lot busier than Tuesday at midnight, but they had no answer. They don't think to seem it's weird that a traceroute at 7:55pm is 30ms a hop and right at 8:01pm it jumps to 150 to 200+ms per hop with lots of time outs.
Here they are correct, and it is not necessarily weird to see that pattern. Internet congestion these days is primarily caused by streaming video services demanding concurrent constant bit-rate bandwidth, and peak streaming video times now closely match those of regular TV viewing times. The weekends see more total traffic volume of traffic, but the extra volume is spread out throughout the day, meaning more people watch streaming video over the course of the day, but there are fewer people trying to watch at the exact same time. The evenings are different from the daytime. M-F see the volume all within the 6pm to 12am timeframe, and there isn't that much of a difference in traffic patterns between a Saturday night and a Tuesday night anymore these days. Internet is the new TV.
The last email I sent them was to tell them how ridiculous it is that they don't offer credits for this and are ok with customers paying full price for a service that's only usable half the day.
I can't really help you here, but FWIW, I agree with you.
I had Verizon FIOS before Frontier took over. I never had service problems with them, only billing issues. Then the first few years of Frontier were fine. The last year has been total shit with problems constantly. It wouldn't bother me so much if they actually looked into stuff right away as opposed to racking up thousands of complaints after 3 months, then rolling out a plan to fix it over another 3 months.
That is Frontier's business model. They are very cost conscious. FiOS came to Frontier "well engineered" with plenty of excess capacity and engineering rules that ensured that capacity was never fully consumed. Frontier's business rules changed that. Frontier saw this excess capacity and high spend on future predictive upgrades as wasted capital (money spent on capacity that just sat there unused for weeks/months/years/etc.) that could be better used elsewhere on areas that were further behind. Over the first 3 years, the excess capacity of the FiOS network was slowly consumed as other places got the upgrades instead. After it was consumed, Frontier allowed it to remain congested until the pain point was seen in the revenue (e.g., customers started complaining, then leaving). Then upgrades started to happen, which various folks are starting to see now. Taking a look at the history of complaints in these forums and others, you'll find this to be their standard operating model. Reactive cost conscious, rarely proactive. Unlike companies such as Windstream (if you think we have it bad, go browse their forum), Frontier does actually do upgrades. They just have to see customer churn first.
I won't argue one way or the other on the merit or lack of merit of such a business model (it is obviously not a very pro-consumer one), but it is what they have historically chosen to do, and it does not seem to be hurting their financials any. Enough customers stick around to keep their shareholders happy.