More than 80% of U.S. households spend an average of $116 per month on cable and internet service. Internet speed is a key consideration for consumers as they choose an Internet service provider ("ISP") and service plan, so it's essential that ISPs truthfully represent what speeds they can deliver. Frontier Communications ("Frontier") provides Digital Subscriber Line ("DSL") internet to more than one million consumers in 25 states, many of them in rural areas. As alleged in the complaint, Frontier told consumers that it could provide service "up to" certain speeds, but failed to deliver. The complaint details how, in some cases, Frontier could not, as a technical matter, even possibly deliver the speeds it promised. Some consumers paid for more expensive service than they received.
Concurring Statement of FTC Commissioner Noah Joshua Phillips regarding Frontier Communications Corp., et al [telecom]
May 09, 2022
Last reply: 4 years ago
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I can't recall ADSL2+ or VDSL, but when I worked there, the two ADSL tiers were "Broadband Max" (up to 6 Mb/s dl) or "Broadband Lite" (up to
1 Mb/s dl). "Lite" was $31.99/mo and "Max" was $34.99/mo -- depending on the market.If, for example, a rural customer could only achieve 3.76 Mb/s, we sold them "BB Max", as it made sense for a few more dollars per month to achieve over 3 times the bandwidth. 1 Mb/s is almost useless in this day, unless you do nothing other than Usenet and E-Mail; forget about streaming video.
In short: I suppose the issue here was that we/Frontier still marketed the "BB Max" as "up to 6 Mb/s", even if the customer could only achieve
3.76 Mb/s (or anything over 1.5 Mb/s) and that's what they were provisioned for. I, of course, always looked up and informed the customer what they were going to be provisioned at, but I suspect that many phone reps did *not* do that.Join the Discussion
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