My Slow Frontier DSL Internet Service in McCall
I hate to complain about this service, as the technicians who’ve come out have been very nice, but here’s the truth: I have very slow Frontier DSL internet service. Performance will be “fine” (fine equals about 80% of the speed I’m supposed to be getting) much of the time and then just seriously cut out throughout the day and evening. You really notice when you’re trying to watch a movie on Netflix or a Hulu video, etc. I should clarify that last statement. I really notice it no matter what — watching a movie or video is practically impossible. Heck, blogging right now is utterly terrible. With Netflix, the Silverlight software figures out what speed and quality to play, sets up a buffer, plays swimmingly well for 20 minutes or so (mileage varies) and then bam, you get the “Your internet connection has slowed message…” and 5-10 minutes later your up and running again. Lame. This will often happen multiple times throughout a movie. I’m constantly managing the buffer and pausing the movie so it doesn’t crap-out and restart the whole process.
I’ve called Frontier multiple times — as this is far and away the slowest and most sporadic broadband Internet service I’ve ever had. I’m pretty sure that takes us back to the Clinton Administration. Not sure, but it’s been a long time. The routine is the same — they tell me to go to speedtest.frontier.net and run it. Yada, yada. The test usually comes back at an acceptable level, which is frustrating. They’ve sent two technicians out who haven’t found a problem with the lines or the modem.
The technicians who come out keep asking me if the slowdown is “time of day dependent”. My response is “not always,” but it does seem worse in the evening — which makes sense, as that’s when the bulk of folks are streaming lots of zeros and ones. However, I’m not streaming movies during the day, so daytime slowdowns would be a bit less noticeable I would guess.
The last technician that swung by said that all of his tests indicated that the line from inside the house up to the road was fine — and his money was on a bandwidth issue. As in, someone with an infected PC somewhere on Frontier’s DSL network is stealing all my bandwidth. He said he would run it up the chain of command. I should have asked him what next steps were for contacting me, but I was in a trance it would seem and nothing concrete was established for a follow up. Ball’s in my court.
As a bit of an aside, what doesn’t make sense to me is that DSL providers love to throw around in their marketing materials that unlike cable broadband, DSL service doesn’t suffer from other users hopping on the network. As far as I recall, it’s basically DSL’s ONLY play as cable generally beats the snot out of DSL speeds hands-down. And evidently it’s perhaps not even really true. I don’t claim to be an expert in this area, just know what I’m experiencing.
So where am I with all this? I’m not really sure.
I think it’s time to call again as things are really creeping right now. It’s so bad that it inspired this post. And I happened to grab a doozy of a screenshot showing just how bad it is. For those of you that didn’t notice, that’s a download speed of 48kbps! Wahoo! Surf is up. I might as well plug in the 56K dial-up modem and see what free internet service I can get that outperforms this baby.
Is anyone else experiencing similar service? Frontier, if you’re reading this, drop me a line.
-Scott
Yes Scott, our household and our whole neighborhood has frontier and it seems that our internet is slow also. So slow that i could make strogunoff while i load a simple youtube video that is 2 min long and by the time im back, its about 3/4 loaded.
Hi Tom,
I love that quote… “So slow that i could make a strogunoff while i load a simple youtube video…” Classic! Well, miserly loves company I guess. Thanks for the comment and the company. Have you found that the “slowness” happens more frequently at any particular time of day? Also, I presume that all of your neighbors are having similar experiences?
Cheers,
Scott
Another Frontier tech came out today. He was great. He listened, did some tests, looked at all the speedtest, ping and traceroute data I’ve been collecting and definitely seemed to grok the fact that something is amiss, despite the fact that while he was here performance was excellent. I feel like “he’s on it” and that it’s not going to go into a black hole. Time will tell if this is an issue that’s within their control or not, but I feel like we’re on the right track toward a resolution. So once again, no complaints with the support….
My frontier has recently slowed wayyyy down…within the past couple weeks the download speed is HORRIBLE!! And even with page loading I have to refresh before it will actually load the page! Very frustrating! I think it may be time to switch. Not much available here either..but may have to try Time Warner as that is where our cable is….*sigh*
We have been having an awful time with our DSL and have had similar experiences. I’m getting close to switching. If it’s 8 pm or later, it’s been pretty much impossible to do anything, even just reading a news article, and we’re fed up.
Mine is slow too! Ridiculous when I try to sign into e-mail and it takes forever. I have called too and it’s always blamed on the time of day…even though it happens all day. Sigh. May have to look into another company even though I like the techs.
West Central IL is the same game. I signed up for 3 mbps internet for two years and now the cable folks are running fiber optic cable across the street. I have to keep this shit for two years?
Slowed down so much I am seriously thinking of changing to cable
I’m down to 586 down speed tonight, also I keep having to reboot my modem because of disconnects. Have had DSL for ten years but won’t get to 11 as I have had enough of this low quality internet service. Besides that, have no need for a home phone anymore either as we both have cellphones we already pay for. So goodbye to Frontier tomorrow AM.
Mine stinks as well …..all downloads seemed to be capped at 125kbs no matter what …if I go to testing sites it show my download speed a 1.5mb or so but when I actually download a file …could be from anywhere it’s between 45kb and 125kb but never more …wiered if you ask me.
Sorry to hear about your troubles folks ,I had charter internet for the last 5 years my download speeds are over 8500kbs, that is until today we moved in with the mom n law which has DSL thru Ben Lomand downloads are only 456kbs but luckily before our move i schedule a transfer of service 2 days of the snail internet and i will ba back on the mainstream, But i main point is before i decided to get DSL or cable I learned that for DSL your speed is dependent on how close you are to the tower and the number of ppl logged on at the time thats why i went with cable I hope all of you get your problems resolved and good luck
This frontier DSL is awful and it is the WORST I have ever seen it. I think I might as well be using dial up. It is like this in the middle of the wee hours, too! I think a mass migration away from frontier is a likely possibility,
So yesterday around 3pm central time i was disconnected rudely form World of Warcraft. I tried logging back in but it kept getting stuck on “connected” as if the net was crap. Went to Youtube, site loaded ok but when i went to watch one of my subscriptions the vid took about 3 minutes to load 5 seconds of video. Today logged onto WoW and it seemed fine but anytime i got near another person it seemed my latency shot through the roof and I’d eventually disconnect. First time this has happened. Tried running speed tests but half the time the site wont even load to run the test…
I live in Pine Grove, West Virginia. Our Frontier DSL used to be okay but in the last few weeks it has become unreasonably slow. We can’t play video from news or other sites like we used to. It’s slow all day. Other folks in the community are complaining also. I think I’ll call them tomorrow. Thanks for your post. I’m not alone
We live in a rural area, and Frontier is the only provider. So they have us over a barrel. We pay them a heap of money for land line, long distance, and high speed internet. We used to get 2meg download speeds. But for the past year we have been getting 400k download speeds, sometimes even worse than that. We can’t even watch a Youtube. We may as well have a dial-up. I have called Frontier several times, and their answer is always “there’s nothing we can do about it.”
I’m from WV as well. Recently our old Internet provider, after years of being faithful customers, decided that they couldn’t maintain service in our area and to go with Verizon (frontier) so without having a real choice we ordered dsl and had it arrive earlier than expected. I was so ecstatic I couldn’t contain myself. When I set it up it seemed a little slow but I shrugged it off because it was a new device. Mere hours later and I’m able to load websites FASTER on my CELLPHONE than I can on my actual Internet provider! Like many others I have to reload pages over and over. I am a college student I can’t afford to waste time trying to get my PDFs to load or hope that my professor got that email. This is horrible service and I’ve only been a customer for a couple hours.
ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS PLAY MY MMO AND I COULDN’T EVEN DO THAT BECAUSE THE LAG WAS SO BAD!!!!