Third-World Internet from Frontier Communications

The internet and phone went out Halloween night. There was a light rain, and with Frontier Communications that’s all it takes. The rain doesn’t need to be local. As long as it is raining, or someone sneezes, anywhere in the world, Frontier Communications internet and phone service is likely to fail.

Frontier appears to be a company that exists to fleece the government for the money the FCC has been handing out to provide internet service to rural areas, while providing the bare minimum needed to maintain its monopoly over telephone and internet “service” in those areas. There’s a long history of companies doing that kind of thing, but Frontier is the modern poster child for the practice.

When I moved here almost 20 years ago, the AT&T spinoff Verizon was the phone company. The service was reliable, though the internet arrived only by dial-up modem.

The internet problem got solved, sort of, when I got satellite internet via a company called Wild Blue. It wasn’t great and it was expensive, but it was faster than dial-up and reliable except during heavy rain or snowstorms.

A little over a decade ago, Frontier Communications hit the scene here. It apparently had acquired the local Verizon franchise — the machinations involved are obscure — and at first it was great. We got genuine high-speed internet, delivered reliably at a reasonable price. When there was an issue or you had a question, you could quickly get a helpful, English-speaking person who could answer the question or solve the problem. Streaming television was now possible.

But Frontier began to decline. The first indication, to me, was when I tried to connect a small cellular receiver to my Frontier internet line. It was deliberately blocked by Frontier. (I could explain the technical specifics, but they would bore you.) I spent most of a day talking to various Frontier technicians up the chain (speaking English and located in the United States) in hope of getting it unblocked.

The device was provided by my cellular company at the time, T-Mobile, so that I could receive cellular calls here, where there is no cellular service. It would have cost Frontier nothing, nor would it have taken away any of their business, unless they were affiliated with a cellphone company that wasn’t T-Mobile. (Wait for stunning coincidence below.)

“I’m not allowed to talk about it,” said the top Frontier technician. “But I get calls like yours every day.” He spoke with a touch of sadness, knowing that it would take him 30 seconds to solve the problem, but his doing so was forbidden.

Who is the biggest cellular telephone company? Why, that would be Verizon. I have no idea if Verizon provides little cellular repeaters for its customers to hook up to the internet, but I bet if they did, Frontier would have had no problem clearing the way for them. It seems likely that this is what the Frontier technician couldn’t tell me. There’s an unholy thread of Verizon running through Frontier.

Frontier’s coating of slime thickened. On April 17, 2018, Frontier sent out new “terms of service.” The company’s email “service” would now go through “OATH” a consortium of Yahoo and AOL. Among the new, foul-smelling terms was this:

“We’ve updated some of the ways we collect and analyze user data in order to deliver services, content, and relevant advertising to you and protect against abuse. This includes:

“Analyzing content and information (including emails, instant messages, posts, photos, attachments, and other communications) when you use our services. This allows us to deliver, personalize and develop relevant features, content, advertising and services

Linking your activity on third-party sites and apps with information we have about you.

“We’ve joined Verizon. By joining Verizon, Oath and its affiliates may share the information we receive among Verizon.”

What that means: subscribers’ internet activity, including private e-mail messages, would be spied upon and the information gathered and sold as the company saw fit. You had to click the “I agree” box or you could not use their e-mail at all. I did not agree and that day acquired ProtonMail encrypted e-mail service. I now knew that Frontier Communications thinks of its customers as the juicer regards the oranges. Frontier customers have as much choice as the orange does. And Frontier is a monopoly in the places it harvests.

Frontier’s business has been to acquire control of older, less profitable telephone franchises from existing companies. It would modernize them, or say it had modernized them, or say it would modernize them. It received enormous payments — tens of millions of dollars — from the federal government as the result of a rural internet modernization project. For a time, it seemed to do what it had agreed to do in exchange for those millions of dollars.

But the quality of Frontier service quickly declined. It declared bankruptcy. It awarded its executives huge bonuses — while in bankruptcy — suggesting they had done what they were hired to do. It had failed to do many of the things for which the government had paid it. If you now called tech support, you now would speak to someone in a boiler room in India. (“Offshore,” is how the woman I spoke with described it, after I had spent more than two hours of trying to get to an actual human the day after Halloween.) It cranked out an “app,” good solely for the transfer of money from customer to Frontier, or ordering new “services.” It has no provision for reporting a service outage. It does have a crash-prone “chat” bot that will make you very angry and avail you of nothing.

(By comparison, the electric company has a page where customers can report blackouts — you can log in, report the problem, and be done in a couple of minutes.)

Frontier does everything it can to prevent customers from being able to report problems, which for Frontier customers are frequent. It also does all it can to make outages as damaging as possible, such as providing no power backup for its distribution systems. If there is a power glitch so short that it doesn’t even make the clocks start blinking, it takes down phone and internet for from 15 minutes to an hour.

Frontier requires you to have a cellular telephone, which is good advice when doing business with a company as terrible as Frontier. But the places Frontier bought up phone franchises, such as here, frequently have no cellular coverage. (To complete the thought: the “offshore” woman scheduled an appointment, even though the problem has nothing to do with my house’s wiring or equipment, to restore my internet a week hence, which is to say last Friday. As is typical of Frontier, the repairman never showed up.)

Until just a few years ago, though they came in on the same line, Frontier’s telephone and internet services were separate. The internet could go down but phone service remained. But then Frontier replaced their equipment with something else. Now phone service was VoIP — voice over internet protocol — so when the internet went down, everything went down.

Getting tech support — which the recording that’s part of the near-endless outage reporting gantlet says will be provided if and only if one is sitting at one’s computer — was now impossible.

The places whose phone lines Frontier bought up usually have no communication other than the telephone. So it also became impossible for anyone to call the fire department, police, or ambulance in emergencies. Nor was it possible for anyone to get in touch with those woebegone customers. What had been working perfectly was now no longer reliable.

It gets worse, still. Frontier ceased to maintain its lines and equipment. When a drooping Frontier line got snagged by an overloaded logging truck here in July 2021, a fellow came round to re-string it, sort of. I had driven around until I found him, and told him in person about the line being down. He said I would have to call India and report it. So I drove to town, where there is cellular service (remember when there were local phone company offices? Frontier doesn’t) and sat in a parking lot for more than two hours while trying to explain to a guy who barely spoke English in a boiler room in the Indian subcontinent what a telephone line is; he really didn’t seem to know. Then, a day or two later the guy I’d spoken with in person came and hooked up the line again. After he was done it drooped to within four feet of the ground. He’d be back later to string it properly, he said, when he got his bucket truck back. That was an untruth, so far. It remains four feet off the ground today.

Nor has internet service been reliable here since then. In a typical day it will go off and on a dozen times, sometimes that many times in an hour. I do not know if Frontier monitors this; I do know that it doesn’t care. There is now no practical way, even if you can find cellular service, to report an outage. On Friday, as I entered the hours-long ordeal of reporting Frontier’s failure, Frontier’s “app” reported that my internet service was working just fine. I can only imagine the ordeal of trying to get a refund from the outfit, which word I use advisedly, as one might say “the Chicago outfit,” for the many paid-for but not provided days of service.

(There has been one “improvement”: the “offshore” woman did not try to run a scam on me. Frequently — more than half the time — the boiler-room person offers some deal for faster internet at a very low price or some other too-good-to-be-true bargain. If you express interest, you are asked for your Social Security number and date of birth. These things are not necessary for internet service, but they are very useful for identity fraud. I’m not saying this obvious scam ring is an official Frontier project, but I wouldn’t rule out that possibility, given how the company comports itself in other ways. And for all I know, the “offshore” woman got in trouble for failing to try to scam me.)

In September it was announced that, apparently having sucked up all the government money it could get, Frontier Communications was being acquired. Can you guess by whom? I knew you could. By Verizon. If I were a betting man I’d guess the fix was in from the beginning, that it was never about providing internet service to rural areas but was instead a scheme to collect government money for Verizon. A forensic accountant could find fertile fields there, I suspect.

Meanwhile, there is an internet company that actually could provide service to rural parts of the country without reliance on phone lines at all. But last December the Federal Communications Commission announced that there is no money — as there had been in vast profusion to subsidize the unholy Frontier-Verizon alliance — to make the Starlink service more affordable to residents of outlying areas. Starlink is expensive. (Frontier would be, too, were it not for federal subsidies.) But oddly the FCC did what it could to preserve Frontier-Verizon’s monopoly. I’d like to look at Frontier-Verizon’s political donations, but as I mentioned I have Frontier, which is to say no, internet.

(I should note here that Starlink is providing service, free of charge, to the North Carolina hurricane victims. There are reports that the government tried to prevent it doing so. But when the government has astronauts stranded in space, it’s SpaceX, Starlink’s parent company, that the government calls to get them home. It is this kind of thing that causes voters to put someone like Trump in office.)

Over the last couple of months I have logged how poor the service has been here, by pinging the internet once every three seconds. The results, which I’ve archived offsite, are worse than I would have guessed.

Here’s what the log tells me, just for the week beginning a little before 9 p.m. Halloween. I was going to list the downtimes, but they ran on for pages. Typically “service” goes off and on every little while, down long enough to disconnect phone calls scores of times each day; long enough to disrupt computer use or television streaming. For the week from 9 p.m. Halloween to 9 p.m. November 7, there were 51 outages of more than a minute, 26 for more than 5 minutes, 10 for more than 30 minutes, seven for more than an hour, and two for more than a day. The two longest ones, 35 hours, 41 minutes and 26 hours, 12 minutes, lasted longer than are encountered in a typical week, but the rest are typical Frontier internet here, day after day, week after week, month after month. And I didn’t add the hundreds of times it goes down each week for less than a minute. Suffice it to say that Frontier internet delivered no internet that week for close to half the time.

I suppose I should mention that yes, I pay my bill on time each month.

I guess I’m going to have to switch to Starlink, which I can’t really afford. It costs twice as much as Frontier, but if Frontier were half what it costs it would be overpriced.

I would normally include links to the things I’ve said here, but I’m on Frontier, the officially endorsed internet provider to Hell, and at the moment the internet and phone are out.

It is satisfying to think of the Frontier-Verizon executives and board of directors being sentenced to something appropriate. And because of Frontier service the governor is unable to get through with a last-minute reprieve.