frontiercommunications

Frontier-CETF shotgun marriage will continue til death do us part

18 January 2019 by Steve Blum
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Shotgun wedding

Frontier Communications and the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) have tentatively settled a dispute over a mandated low income broadband marketing program. Under the terms of the agreement, instead of ending last year, as previously scheduled…

  • The program will continue indefinitely.
  • Frontier will pay CETF an additional $25,000.
  • CETF won’t have to pay back any of the approximately $700,000 remaining from the $1 million advanced to it.
  • Performance goals remain “aspirational” rather than hard targets.
… More

Cable, fiber systems deliver broadband service at or near advertised speeds, DSL generally doesn’t, FCC report says

10 December 2018 by Steve Blum
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Fcc 2018 broadband report download

The FCC’s primary broadband metric is now the 80/80 benchmark: the minimum speed that 80% of users experience, 80% of the time during primetime viewing hours. When evaluated against that benchmark, cable modem and fiber-to-the-home systems do a reasonably good job of delivering service at advertised speeds. Among Californian providers, only Comcast fell noticeably short, with actual download speeds hitting around 90% of what they promise.

Telco DSL-based service doesn’t do so well. According to the FCC’s latest field tests, AT&T’s and Frontier Communications’ legacy DSL services – the kind you often find in rural California – deliver speeds that are about 60% of what they promise.… More

Booming prime time video peaks will slam broadband networks over the next five years

28 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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Three-quarters of all Internet traffic is video and that share will grow to 82% over the next five years, according to the latest update to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, which is an ongoing broadband tracking study published by the company. Cisco also projects that global Internet traffic will more than triple over that time.

In other words, video is why there’s rapidly rising demand for faster broadband service speeds, and greater capacity. Not just because there’s more of it, but also because people don’t watch it consistently over the course of the day: the ballooning volume of video traffic is crammed into prime viewing hours.… More

CPUC allows AT&T, Frontier to tap dance their way out of fines for bad service

16 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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AT&T and Frontier Communications were fined $2.2 million and $823,000, respectively, by California Public Utilities Commission, for “chronic” service failure, primarily in rural California. Sorta. Kinda.

Well, not really.

At its meeting in Fresno last week, the CPUC voted unanimously to allow Frontier and AT&T to skip the fines, which were mostly for taking too long to restore telephone service for customers who experienced outages. In return, the companies promised to make “incremental” investments in improving service quality.… More

Money and performance at center of CETF’s fight with Frontier

14 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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Frontier Communications says the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) has to return $714,000, if it asks for it. CETF’s response on Friday was we don’t have it anymore.

When Frontier won California Public Utilities Commission approval in 2015 to buy Verizon’s landline telephone systems in California, a long list of conditions was attached. Among them was a contract that committed “up to” $3 million to achieve the “aspirational goal” of signing up 200,000 low income Californian households for broadband service – from any provider, not just Frontier.… More

CPUC tells Frontier to answer charge it’s not meeting Verizon purchase obligations

7 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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Frontier Communications’ delivery on promises made when it received permission to buy Verizon’s Californian telephone systems in 2015 will be investigated by the California Public Utilities Commission. Earlier this year, the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) asked the commission to unilaterally change some of the conditions they imposed on Frontier when they approved the deal, claiming that the goals of the decision were not met.

According to the CPUC administrative law judge handling the case, last month CETF and six of its non-profit clients sent a letter to commissioners accusing Frontier of “attempting to abandon their obligations and escape their public benefit commitments”.… More

CPUC refuses to reconsider waiving AT&T, Frontier fines for bad rural service

1 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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AT&T, Frontier Communications and other telephone companies can continue to fine themselves and keep the money, if they fail to meet California’s service quality standards. The California Public Utilities Commission rejected an appeal by a group of consumer organisations, which claim that the bizarre 2016 decision allowing telcos to pay their own expenses instead of paying fines was made “without any support whatsoever in the record”.

The decision was rammed through by commission president Michael Picker, who refused to allow a vote on an alternative offered by then-commissioner Catherine Sandoval, contrary to usual procedure.… More

Frontier’s Colusa DSL subsidy request breaks rules, which is OK if everyone can play

31 October 2018 by Steve Blum
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Frontier Communications wants $253,000 from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) to upgrade its copper DSL facilities in the town of Colusa, in rural Colusa County. Its existing service in and around the community relies on a mix of 1990s vintage DSL and more advanced ADSL2 and VDSL technology. It’s proposing to upgrade its central office to extend its VDSL capabilities, and run fiber to the county fairgrounds in town.

The justification for the project, as described in the public summary Frontier distributed, is 45 homes that either don’t have any broadband access at all, or the service they have delivers less than 6 Mbps download or 1 Mbps upload speeds.… More

Frontier knows how to game the broadband subsidy system, and that’s OK CPUC says

12 August 2018 by Steve Blum
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The California Public Utilities Commission has decided that broadband subsidy proposals can be challenged almost forever, instead of right up until the moment commissioners vote, as it has allowed in the past. It rejected an appeal of a 2017 grant by a wireless Internet service provider in Trinity County, Velocity Communications, ruling that once a draft decision is issued, ISPs can’t submit speed test data that purports to show that the area in question is “served” and thus ineligible for a California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) grant.… More

Consumers say they’re paying too much for poor Internet service

4 August 2018 by Steve Blum
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Big Internet service providers hit all time low in customer satisfaction ratings, according to the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) telecommunications company rankings. The survey ranks telecoms companies and service offerings on a 100-point scale. ISPs dropped from an overall industry average of 64 out of 100 in 2017 to 62 this year, and overall the broadband industry is making people very unhappy.

According to ACSI, it’s a case of the bad just getting worse…

Internet service providers (ISPs) are down 3.1% to 62—an all-time low for the industry that along with subscription TV already had the poorest customer satisfaction among all industries tracked by the ACSI.

… More