Five months since I have switched from Comcast to Frontier internet provider and it seems like enough time passed to write a measured review.
Good things first. I have subscribed for a 2Gbit plan and Frontier delivers! Connection is as fast as they promise at all times and the dramatic increase in an upload speed (from 40Mbit to 2Gbit in comparison with Comcast) is extremely important to me for my work. Another important benefit that Frontier has no caps unlike Comcast which caps your monthly traffic to 1.2TB. This together with great upload speed finally makes it possible for me to backup the data to the cloud. Finally I feel that my data is completely safe and won't be lost even in worst scenarios. So in terms of speed and quality of service Frontier does deliver what it promises!
Frontier has some problems as well. The most important one is the service reliability. I used to be a Comcast customer and not by choice. I did not like the company and their policies, but I can only say good things about their reliability. While being their customer for many years I recall only three farily short service outages. With Frontier I had already four in 5 moths. One of them fairly lengthy (entire day). I hope it is just a coincidence and I am not going to have an outage every month on average.
Second thing is the knowledge of their sales/customer service. For instance, before ordering the service I was curious if they support IPv6 (desirable for the work I do), and at first I was getting a surprised "IP what?" from sales rep and then after a period of consultation away from the phone was given a wrong answer anyway. They are networking company and their sales reps definitely should know what they are selling!
The third is the service enrollment. The process is not well designed and their work with third party vendors leaves a lot to be desired. Here is my story.
I have ordered the service over Internet and scheduled a visit of an installer on a particular date. The installers are a third party vendor to Frontier. The installer came over and discovered that the fiber cable does not go all the way to my house, but stops a few houses before. We live on the side of a hill and the cable is not easy to pull without a bucket truck. He did not have enough cable with him, so he was not able to do the job anyway. He promised to bring the truck in a day or two, left his number to call about the status and left. I tried to call and test him periodically a few days, but got no response and his answering machine was full anyway.
Then I tried to solve this through the Frontier and was surprised that you must be an existing customer just to talk to them! If you do not give your account number to the automated answering system, it won't get you through to the customer service and you won't get an account number until you already have your service installed. You have to fail a lot of questions when the system tries to identify your account and then finally it gives up and connects you to a human being. In the course of a few days I had to do that a lot. Customer service acknowledged this problem and said that pending installations are in a sort of limbo in their system.
Then there were three times I tried to reschedule the visit on a specific range of dates over the phone, but every time after I hung up and check their ticket system online in a few hours, it turned out the date was wrong. I could not schedule the visit online because of this bucket truck requirement I mentioned above. In these calls I was getting confident, but contradictory information about how this would work. In the last call they confidently said that the vendor would come out in advance and pull the cable to my house and then another installer without a truck will come out on the scheduled day and path my house to it. Of course, this was not what actually happened. On the scheduled date another installer without a bucket truck showed up and noted that the cable was never pulled to my house.
Fortunately the guy was great and had enough cable with him. He managed to do all the work just using a ladder and got my house connected.
I hope Frontier improves their enrollment procedure, trains their staff better and establishes more tight relationships with their vendors. It seems like do have to do some work on reliability improvements as well.
Nevertheless, for me the benefits of the Frontier service outweigh all the problems described above and I would recommend it to those who use the internet for more than browsing and email.
Since enrollment is a one-time affair, I did not drop a point in my overall rating of the service, but I did drop one for the reliability. read more