Last year, customers of Rochester, NY based DSL provider Frontier learned about the company's plans to employ 5GB caps for all tiers after the carrier slipped references to the plan into their service TOS. After some initial public backlash, Frontier said they might look at higher caps, which were supposed to officially arrive sometime this winter. While the new caps have yet to arrive, it's pretty clear that the company is still thinking about it.

"It is important that customers that use less don't subsidize those that use the most," Frontier CEO Maggie Wilderotter tells Reuters this week at a meeting of regulators, indicating that the idea of bumping high-consumption users to higher tiers is still percolating. At the moment, Frontier says they personally call excessive users and give them a warning, but it's clear they'd like to start capping and imposing metered billing.

The strange thing about Frontier is that while they offer 10Mbps in Rochester, NY -- the fastest speed they offer in many markets is 3Mbps. According to posts in our forums, many 6Mbps customers are being downgraded to 3Mbps. So while Frontier has been whining about heavy users out of one side of their mouth, they're not really investing in the infrastructure to handle them, or giving these "heavy" 5Gbps+ users anywhere to really upgrade to.

"We all love the Internet, and Frontier is committed to offering you all the bandwidth you need and want to take full advantage of the Web," says the Frontier website. "Our basic residential Internet packages offers 5GB usage -- that's the equivalent of 500,000 basic text e-mails, 2,500 Photos, 40,000 Web Pages, over 300 Hours of Online Game Time, 1,250 downloaded songs, or a mixture of the above!" Indeed.