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TX, FL, CA Verizon Customers See Hiccups in Switch to Frontier

Today is the day that Verizon formally transfers ownership of its Florida, California and Texas fixed-line DSL, FiOS and phone customers to Frontier, and early indications suggest the process isn't going entirely smoothly. Downdetector shows major outages for Frontier nationwide, including portions of the Northeast that should have nothing to do with the transition. Not all of this appears to be Frontier's fault, as a cut fiber in Florida appears to have impacted numerous ISPs around the country.

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If you're a Frontier customer, you can find threads in our Frontier forum regarding the transfer in Texas, Florida, and California.

User experiences appear to be mixed so far, with some users seeing a smooth transition, and others suffering notably degraded speeds. Most customers have noted that Frontier's video on demand library appears offline (addressed by Frontier here), and a lot of the customer portal settings and functionality currently don't appear to be working.

»twitter.com/NormanR4Life ··· 4749313

There's obviously going to be some inevitable hiccups for a transition of this size, but the company says it's looking into service interruptions.

"I would never say we're 100 percent certain it will go perfectly," a Frontier exec said of the looming transition earlier this week. "But we're doing everything we can within our power … from the experience we've gleaned from every conversion we have done to make the next one better. So I'd just say we're pretty experienced at it."

Experienced or not, moving three states' worth of customers from one ISP to another is no easy feat. If you're a former Verizon customer being sold to Frontier, let us know what your experience has been like in the comment section below.

Most recommended from 72 comments



Zenit_IIfx
The system is the solution
Premium Member
join:2012-05-07
Purcellville, VA
·Comcast XFINITY

19 recommendations

Zenit_IIfx

Premium Member

People need to back off and calm down - panic does nothing

Today is the first day of a major network transition. These things never go perfectly, and there will be problems. People who panic, spam Frontier with support requests, and spew hashtags on social media are not helping the situation.

While this acquisition only consisted of three states, it will double Frontier's customer base. Taking on 2x as many customers overnight is not an easy task.

Most of you with FTR FiOS have a 2nd choice, be it Comcast or another Cable MSO should FTR's problems continue. If you depend on HSI for work at home then you should have a backup connection of some type already.

Patience helps with this kind of thing. Wait a day or two and see if things get back to normal.

It was reported that a fiber cut in FL caused most of the issues there; it even impacted AT&T so it must have been a pretty important circuit.
PJL
join:2008-07-24
Long Beach, CA

4 recommendations

PJL

Member

Frontier's Public Statement

It's ludicrous what Frontier is saying about things should be better than prior acquisitions because of their experience. It's been nine hours and all of the issues that appeared within the first hour (and some additional one) are still impacting service!
Edit: When I posted this comment DSLReports.com timed out. I had to refresh back to the DSLR home page to see that it was posted.

RedCaliSS
Premium Member
join:2004-08-21
Murrieta, CA

4 recommendations

RedCaliSS

Premium Member

decent in Murrieta, CA

after working in IT, a NOC specifically in Las Vegas before I retired I know how things go, so I'm expecting a few hiccups, but not really had to much noticeable issues...
upload speed is a little wacky on various speedtest sites....congestion maybe... but, ehh I'll give them a week to sort it all out..... I'm well aware of the monstrous task Verizon and Frontier are facing so I'll patient for a week or so...

Speedtest still shows Verizon FIOS, but I'm sure that will get sorted out once the new DNS numbers propagate throughout the root DNS servers and down...

speedtest,net results



dslreports.com speedtest



rebus9
join:2002-03-26
Tampa Bay

1 edit

4 recommendations

rebus9

Member

2 locations down out of 11

Out of 11 business FIOS locations in the same metro, 2 have been down for ~6 hours and counting.

Repeated calls to Frontier land me in a call center where every rep sounds 5,000 miles away on a tragically-low-quality voice connection, with broken English.

Every call over the past 5 hours so far has resulted in NO troubleshooting, just repetitive scripted apologies telling us to wait "just a little longer". When I push for answers on why only 2 of 11 sites in the same area are down, I just get more apologies and no answers.

Routing via Frontier the past few days has been superior to Verizon, with a quick single-digit millisecond trip into Level3.

But customer service today has been TOTALLY non-existent. Unless you count tediously scripted apologies.

UPDATE: Just got off the phone with someone who sounded EXACTLY like the rep I had a long conversation with. I'm not sure it wasn't the same person pretending to be a supervisor. She guaranteed me that the connections which are down are absolutely related to migration, although she never asked for account numbers.

I said there could be problems UNRELATED to the migration, and she told me they aren't doing any support calls until the migration is finished. Customer service grade: F

Not just for Fail, but total Frustration.
Bob61571
join:2008-08-08
Washington, IL

2 recommendations

Bob61571

Member

Frontier.com is down

as of 11:24 AM CDT