Frontier Lied About Internet Speed, FTC Says In Post-Net Neutrality Case (reuters.com) 50
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and several states filed a lawsuit against Frontier Communications on Wednesday, accusing them of lying about internet speeds, in one of the first cases the regulator has overseen since net neutrality rules were repealed. In the complaint, the agency and state attorneys general said Frontier advertised internet via a digital subscriber line (DSL) at certain speeds to consumers but then failed to deliver.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The FTC was joined on the lawsuit by attorneys general from Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin. District attorneys' offices from two California counties also joined the complaint to represent California. The complaint said Frontier has more than 3 million U.S. internet service subscribers, offering internet via DSL to some 1.3 million consumers in 25 states, many in rural areas. Frontier has advertised different tiers of speeds to consumers, including an August 2018 mailer that offered download speeds of 12 megabits per second for $12, the complaint said. But, the complaint said, since 2015, Frontier has "in numerous instances" promised certain speeds for its DSL internet access but did not deliver. "Indeed, network limits imposed by Frontier prevent numerous consumers from receiving DSL Internet service at speeds corresponding to the tiers of service they pay for," the complaint said. A spokesperson for Frontier, which is emerging from bankruptcy protection, said that the lawsuit was "without merit." "Frontier's DSL Internet speeds have been clearly and accurately articulated, defined and described in the company's marketing materials and disclosures," the spokesperson said.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The FTC was joined on the lawsuit by attorneys general from Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin. District attorneys' offices from two California counties also joined the complaint to represent California. The complaint said Frontier has more than 3 million U.S. internet service subscribers, offering internet via DSL to some 1.3 million consumers in 25 states, many in rural areas. Frontier has advertised different tiers of speeds to consumers, including an August 2018 mailer that offered download speeds of 12 megabits per second for $12, the complaint said. But, the complaint said, since 2015, Frontier has "in numerous instances" promised certain speeds for its DSL internet access but did not deliver. "Indeed, network limits imposed by Frontier prevent numerous consumers from receiving DSL Internet service at speeds corresponding to the tiers of service they pay for," the complaint said. A spokesperson for Frontier, which is emerging from bankruptcy protection, said that the lawsuit was "without merit." "Frontier's DSL Internet speeds have been clearly and accurately articulated, defined and described in the company's marketing materials and disclosures," the spokesperson said.
I'm shocked! (Score:5, Insightful)
Shocked! To find that gambling has been going on in this establishment.
And technically, I'm sure Frontier's correct. I'm sure their marketing was *UP TO* 12Mbps
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Re: I'm shocked! (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm going to market my dialup service as "up to 12 GIGABIT BEEYATCH!". With blackjack. And hookers. On second thought let's just forget the dialup and the blackjack.
But seriously, 12megabit for $12/month would be an amazing bargain. One of those too-good-to-be-true offers.
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No doubt they sold it exactly as such.
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If it's anything like ATT DSL here, they would consider their obligation fulfilled if the speed didn't drop below HALF the promised speed. That's what the CSR agent told me. And if you could get into the modem's config, you'd see that the speed was set for the KIBIBYTE (rounded to even 100's) equivalent, not the "1024" increment. Basically, they treated the poor transmission characteristics of the wiring as a free throttle to save themselves bandwidth EVEN THOUGH all they would have to do is increase your m
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Weasel words (Score:2)
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I'm sure their marketing material said "up to 12 megabit"...
I'm sure it said 12 - but there's a microscopic period between the 1 and the 2...
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Nutrition labels for Internet services (Score:2)
The food industry had a period of similar snake oil salesman issues - dark patterns, intentionally confusing advertising and bad (or just plain missing) nutrition information.
Then we mandated that everyone place standardized nutrition labels upon all food products. It didn't fix all the problems, but it made it a lot easier to figure out what you were getting when you handed some company your hard earned money in exchange for goods.
I'd like to see the same thing for Internet service providers. Advertising t
Re:Nutrition labels for Internet services (Score:4, Informative)
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Not just the last 4 years. There's always been this dread fear that if they do any amount of regulation of ISPs in any way, that the golding internet goose would stop laying eggs. The same rationale why we never paid sales tax on Amazon, thus leading it to become the number one retailer putting a very large number of brick and mortar places who have to collect tax out of business. Even after the dotcom bust no one wanted to add any regulation.
Basic template for everythng is: if things are going great, th
Re: Nutrition labels for Internet services (Score:3)
It's a phone company. What did you expect? (Score:5, Informative)
As someone whose family has to deal with their service, Frontier's billing is a disaster, their customer service is a disaster, and they're a POTS-based DSL service, so of course their Internet speed is a disaster. Frontier has progressively gobbled up a bunch of dying POTS providers, and has done approximately nothing in most places to replace that legacy single-twisted-pair wiring with anything more modern, like fiber.
Frontier quite literally exists exclusively to milk the (largely elderly) people who haven't figured out how to port their number off of POTS to a VoIP service yet and/or who are outside the service area of cable Internet providers. And at their prices (typically about $70 per month for phone service, IIRC, plus a minimum of $45 for DSL), the very second that Starlink becomes available, you can safely assume that anybody even slightly competent is going to migrate completely off of their service faster than you can say "100 times faster for 15% less".
So basically, they're bleeding an asset whose value is rapidly approaching zero, and they're not doing anything to provide any value going forward. They are in such sad shape financially that their common stock became worthless in bankruptcy about a year ago, and amazingly they have already managed to relist their stock via a new IPO to trick fools into parting with a little bit of extra operating capital so that they can burn through it to keep the lights on a little longer.
I'd give them two years to chapter 7, tops, unless they find some sucker who is stupid enough to buy them out for their largely worthless infrastructure at stock market rates rather than waiting for the bankruptcy sale and picking it up at auction for pennies on the dollar.
So let's not worry about whether Frontier lied or not. Let's worry about ensuring a smooth, orderly transition from Frontier to someone else in all of the communities where they operate. Then, let's close that dark chapter in our nation's telecommunications history once and for all.
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I keep seeing huge supporters for StarLink.. but I'm curious as to why you think its so awesome? Latency seems to be really about all it has over, say ViaSat. It costs more per month, and has a $500 setup fee, which ViaSat doesn't. Also, StarLink is still in beta, and there's no general consensus as to when it'll be rolled out for general use.
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I keep seeing huge supporters for StarLink.. but I'm curious as to why you think its so awesome? Latency seems to be really about all it has over, say ViaSat.
One word: VoIP. Remember that approximately all Frontier customers also use their service for their phone service. If you've ever tried to place a phone call that goes over a satellite hop, you'll understand why ViaSat isn't a good alternative to landline phone service. So it replaces the $45 (+ fees, taxes, etc.) portion of Frontier's service, but leaves you with no real alternative to Frontier's horribly overpriced voice service.
I mean yes, if you don't mind having only a cell phone and no home phone,
Re: It's a phone company. What did you expect? (Score:3)
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Ah, but more than two-thirds of their service area is rural. In urban areas, they have either already moved to fiber (which they could sell to someone more competent) or they're a niche player (or, I suppose, both), and in either case, folks already have options, so the transition to other local providers shouldn't be too hard. It's the rural areas that often currently have no real alternative.
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Frontier does provide service in parts of ten cities, but most people in those cities almost certainly have several alternate providers. So Frontier is uninteresting there. When they eventually wither and die, those lines (mostly fiber) will be bought by somebody and used for providing a competing service. No big deal. They're largely a minor player there.
However, most of Frontier's service area is rural. Frontier covers most of Illinois, Wisconsin, rural Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, etc.
re-instate net neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
It's time to re-instate net neutrality.
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While I don't disagree with your points about the deceit surrounding it's repeal, do we have examples of bad things happening because of it's repeal?
A carrier lying about bandwidth #s doesn't count; they've been doing that since forever.
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I think it's more about what didn't get done. The repeal (and all of Ajit Pai's de-regulation moves) were sold under the pretense that once we took the proverbial "regulatory weight" off ISP's backs that prices would lower, they would invest in fiber and infrastructure and expand networks, etc. None of that really came to pass, with network investment hitting pretty low points honestly.
To quote the man:
"Simply put, by returning to the light-touch Title I framework, we are helping consumers and promoting
Re: re-instate net neutrality (Score:2)
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Unless....
you had their DSL.
No more DSL. Your best best is tp hope for unlimited cellular being available in these areas.
If you are still on their legacy DSL... and it still happens to work.... good for you... for that shitty packet losing service.
My service got so bad I just had to up and cancel it. It got to the point of being totally unusable. Even after I told them about and canceled, they went ahead and charged me for a full month of service, even though I didn't get said service.
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The Obama NN were never really about Net Neutrality, they were about increasing taxes and regulation: https://www.realclearpolicy.co... [realclearpolicy.com]
During Obama's NN rules, prices increased in 2015 by 15%, under Trump these increases were half that.
Re:re-instate net neutrality (Score:5, Informative)
Sure you can claim that "thats what they were about" but that would also have to show that regulations and taxes are bad which the article doesn't really do. The main point of contention is that they "picked and chose" which provisions of Title II to apply, and to a certain extent I agree but my response would be they should put all Title II regulations on ISP's. Spiweck (who, and I don't like attacking a source because of it's messenger, belongs to Federalist Society and cannot be taken as objective or unbiased to any degree) doesn't make any case that dropping these regulations will lead to good outcomes, only that they stifle competition. Only the fact of the matter is many of the problems with ISP's is they have little to no competition due to natural monopolies and market failure due to the very high cost of the infrastructure.
Under Trump prices nevertheless still increased, with a pretty big hike from many providers right after the election. [consumerreports.org]. Which is especially rich when everything online has gotten cheaper, from hosting to servers as well as the fact that traffic costs have gone through the floor over the last 10 years.
Fact of the matter is internet service is a market that requires a large amount of regulation or needs to be municipalized just like we have done for power, water, waste and other necessary utilities.
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do we have examples of bad things happening because of it's repeal?
A carrier lying about bandwidth #s doesn't count; they've been doing that since forever.
I mean they've been doing all the things that NN was created for since forever, hence the reason NN was sought. If we exclude all previous to NN behavior, then we've excluded everything from the resultset. I mean you might as well ask for an integer between 2 and 4 excluding 3, and you'll get the same answer. NN was sought because ISPs were shit then and now that NN is gone they can just go back to being shit, no need for them to invent new methods for being shit.
Re: re-instate net neutrality (Score:2)
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Well the FCC or Congress should make all providers advertise and adhere to a minimum speed. The answer is not regulate them less.
Tell us what NN would do here (Score:2)
re-instate net neutrality
Net Neutrality has ZERO to do with ISP speeds, remember these are across the board internet speeds snd not tied to any partucalr service.
So how would re-instating Net Neutrality do anything to help the issue here?
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another free market zealot.
Free markets have nothing to do with the question, in fact the opposite - you claim NN would have kept ISP average speeds up for all services, how again?
Since you don't like free markets it should be quite easy to explain how regulation would magically improve ISP speeds for customers.
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*AT&T and Verizon both torture the meaning of the word “unlimited” by offering multiple unlimited plans. But the more expensive ones are either paired with the company’s own streaming service, or the companies degrade the quality of the video under certain conditions. These practices may give the carrier’s content an advantage in the marketplace over smaller, independent video producers
Once upon a time (Score:2)
I had 2 Regular old phone lines into my house. And a nice 56k modem.
Once 5Mb/s cable service was available, there was one phone line.
A few years later, I had a cell phone.
Called to disconnect the last phone line.
Frontier came out and cut the wires to the house.
Speeds up to 15Mbps!* (Score:2)
*(Maybe bits per second)!
Where do you get an accurate speed test? (Score:2)
I'm not that shocked that Frontier was lying but how do people prove it?
I'm asking from personal experience as when I got my latest iteration of Rogers (Canada) High Speed Internet, I was promised 1Gbps but when I used the Sourceforge Internet Speed Test (no longer available) I got around 570Mbps download, 26Mbps upload with about 30ms ping time. When I complained to Rogers, they said that using their tests, I was getting 950Mbps+ and go away.
Today (right now), when I use https://beta.speedtest.net/ [speedtest.net], I
Re: Where do you get an accurate speed test? (Score:3)
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If you suspect you're being ripped off, I have a suggestion. I will warn you in advance, it involves a significant amount of annoying paperwork, but it might wind up being devastating to Rogers.
File a complaint with the CRTC. They make it really, really annoying, but it can be done. I would get a lot of speed tests done at different times of the day as part of my evidence. If the CRTC upholds the complaint, they have the power to screw Rogers like a crack whore on payday.
Screw Frontier. (Score:1)
No, they lied about their speeds. I can't remember what they claimed my wife's parents could get, but after upgrading them to a $40/mo service, their actual service got worse.. rarely if, ever, got above 1 MB.
Look (Score:2)
Look at my shocked face, just look at it.
. .
o
A lying corporation? No way! (Score:2)
"A spokesperson for Frontier, which is emerging from bankruptcy protection, said that the lawsuit was 'without merit.' 'Frontier's DSL Internet speeds have been clearly and accurately articulated, defined and described in the company's marketing materials and disclosures,' the spokesperson, a lawyer from the law firm Lyon, Sax, O'Shytte said."
Fixed that for you, you thieving scumbags.