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
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Update 1-22-11
Things are looking up on the DSL front in our neck of the woods. Frontier darn near tripled our speed with a hardware upgrade. Yay! This is pretty respectable:
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!!!!
Frontier has got to be the WORST internet service that I have ever used. I’m in Indiana. And all day it’s nothing but constant disconnects and dial-up like speeds at best. I will be going to cable in the morning. THANK GOD. I will warn anyone who has a choice to NOT use Frontier.
Yea. I do a lot of online gaming. I also watch videos on youtube a lot and play around on face-book too. Once the change to frontier happened, I was left unable to even load a facebook. page. After a while, I just used my cell phone, it had better service. Then I looked in our Modem, and we are Supposed to be getting, and paying for 20MB of service, when we are getting like 4MB. Something is messed up with their service and stuff.
It’s not so much the DSL itself is slow it’s the Frontier email that varies from day to day. Right now it’s Sunday morning and sending or receiving email is lke watching paint dry. Going to various web sites is OK.
I just installed Frontier DSL. The speeds are extremely slow. Prior to this, I had broadband service through Comcast. When I go to a site with lots of graphics it takes forever to move around. I don’t believe it is my computer—Comcast gave me no problems. I called Frontier and they are sending someone out. Not sure what I can do to impove download speeds.
So Frustrating!! gave up comcast for frontier a few months ago… downloading is terrible.. feels like back in the 90′s with dial-up. for the money it is not worth it…
Amazing…in NE Ca and having the same issue as all other Frontier users. It is absolutely crazy. Recently left Qwest where we had an outstounding DSL. I thought DSL was DSL, was DSL. What gives FRONTIER…are you listening or do u have trouble downloading all these “complaints”…or is it simply “haha, we have your money and there is no one else…haha”. OOPS…gotta reset my modem again…bye
I’m from Lumberport, WV and we are having the exact same problems, and it is occuring from 5:00 P.M. until about 11:00 P.M. Monday – Friday. Saturday isn’t too bad (everyone is doing something else besides internet), and Sunday evening is horrible. It’s now 11:17 P.M. and we’re still having extremely high latency (900ms) while trying to play MMO games. We didn’t use to have this problem until Frontier bought out Verizon, now we’re being told that there is not enough bandwidth, yet they give us no estimate of when they’ll have it straightened out. Funny thing is, they aren’t having any problem taking our money for “HIGH SPEED” DSL every month.
I used to have cable internet through Mediacom and switched to Verizon because of issues with their Cable TV capabilities. All went well with the internet, slower, but acceptable until Frontier took over. My internet MUST be throttled somehow. Down loaded a game from Steam and it took 3 DAYS at 24 hours per day! Regardless of time, the BEST download speed I can get is only 85 Kbs. Even my kids make fun of my slow internet.
mine is at 56k most of the time. frontier said they cant help me, i have to many tickets with this phone number. so sad, have fun getting me to pay the bill. here i come comcast. frontier = POSISP haha
Same exact thing is still happening and its 2011… Thinking about switching.. It’s been happening to me since about fall of last year. Dunno how we really stuck out with it until now. I’m in NorCal. Something is up with Frontier lol…
I see that most post are older, but I thought I would give it a try. I am trying to find people in the upstate area that are having a hard time with speeds. I have been calling for over a month and I keep getting told it is a big overall problem they are trying to figure out. The techs I talk to on the phone keep telling me that it is the biggest problem they have seen. I have no choice, but to have Frontier we have nothing else in my area. I just figured if this problem is so big how come I can not find anyone complaining on-line. They also gave me my money back for last months internet with no questions asked. You bet your butt I will be calling them every month to get a credit until they get their stuff together.
Yes.. I am also having the same problem.. We gave up Time Warner recently which is three times faster then Frontier’s DSL..Same as everyone else..used to run just fine during the day and about 5 at night it was like it hit the Rush Hour Traffic!! Now it is just slow all day and i can’t watch youtube or even think about streaming a movie from Netflix..I think everyone should just hold back paying them for a bit.. bet then it will get fixed!! I live just outside Rochester, New York
Hey Guess What I know the service reoair number for Frontier “by Heart” thats pretty bad. DSL with Frontier has always “slowed” service techs here are the only thing good. But they have Corporate to deal with. It does’nt give credits for down time. I would like to hear if anyone finds a resolution to the problem
Will, call them every month and demand your money back for the month. No reason to get turned off. They gave me a full month credit if enough people ask for their money back they are going to fix it. I got a credit with no questions ask they did not even try and fight me. I will be calling every month until me speeds are up to get a credit.
Omg I feel like I am getting Deja Vu, from your post. Ours does exactly the same, except we haven’t gotten the same friendly service you appearantly did. We get lies and run arounds. They told us they would have our internet not only fixed by the middle of January, but they also told us they would upgrade our internet from 3mbps to 7mbps for free, and if anything I think our internet is going a lot slower.
Thanks for the heads up everyone! Here in Indiana i’ve had prehistoric dial up for 5 years (cheap). Was just going to try Frontier DSL…not anymore!
Frontier Communications Inc. is the only game in town for millions of users, including me. I’m only 4.5 miles from town, but no cable here. No other telephone service providers either. While Frontier did upgrade my DSL service to an “advertised” 3MBPS about a year ago, what they deliver is far from a steady 3MBPS – it’s a surging signal, constantly bouncing between zero and 3MBPS.
You can watch the download stream with BitMeter or other software and see the signal drop out for a few seconds or up to a minute, at random intervals. Something in the Frontier system is experiencing overload and the stream just stops momentarily. The quality is not satisfactory for Netflix streaming, or much of any streaming, if you’re not prepared for routine pauses.
All this excellence for about $70 per month. Yes, it is better than dial-up (which is also Frontier) but it still sucks. Given Frontier’s customer ratings in all their markets, I don’t expect improvement. Ten MBPS is a pipe dream in rural areas, and provider monopoly is the rule.
Tune in her a year or three years from today and you’ll hear the same complaints…
my frontier dsl dog slow today at .14 mbs download and .24 upload
We have the same problem. The frontier’s speedtest says it is fine, but it I run Cnet’s speedtest, the download speeds are about 1/3rd of what frontier’s says it is. The latency is so bad, it makes playing games online almost impossible. Forget about watching movies, I wouldn’t even try!!!
Yep- just spent 2 1/2 hours trying to watch a 43 minute episode of Castle on Hulu, about 30seconds at a time. Have contacted frontier about this problem 4 or possibly 5 times now, and they always want me to do the same little dance- reboot the router, do the speedtest, blah blah, only to say well, we’re sorry, we’ll look into it, but it never gets better. Sick of paying through the nose for lousy service, but am a rural customer with no other options for landline, and barely one bar of cell on a clear day. Has anyone contacted the atty general’s office or BBB here in NY state about this? Seems like an awful lot of people are getting crappy service and sketchy billing from a company with, in much of its service area, no competiton. I would definitely sign onto a letter or class action or something. Money’s too tight to blow $100 a month on service I can’t use.
Frontier blows, the internet sucks and their “technicians” have no idea what they are doing. I used to have them come out to see why it was so incredibly slow since I can’t watch streaming videos or anything without very poor performance, and as far as gaming, have no chance at being competitive with the connection being so slow and sporadic. The few that came out didn’t know what to do besides replace the router which wasn’t the problem, they just didn’t know what else to do. Even running tracerts and showing frontier all that faults in their connection was futile. They are simple the shittiest ISP, and they know it. That’s why they target areas with no competition for high speed, if there were any other ISP available choose them instead of frontier.
I am in WA State and in July of 2010, Frontier took over the Verizon territory. I was not incredibly impressed with Verizon’s speeds(rarely got what we were paying for)and I am in the same position with Frontier now. It really doesn’t matter which time of day the speed drops it just does. Tech support is great for Frontier for the most part, but for the amount of money they request for the service is outlandish($80 almost for basic telephone and 3mb dsl).
So I can feel the OP and everyone’s pain. For a long time I was trapped with being stuck with this service(small podunk farm town, but with AMAZING FiOS) so now I will be leaving the now Jurassic era of internet service for a nice brand new, FIBER connection with digital phone and base speed of 25mb/s to 80mb/s for $70 a month.
Get away from DSL if you can everyone. Especially if it comes from Verizon or Frontier.
I am like almost everyone else here and am about fed up with Frontier’s High Speed.. If it can be called that!! I am tired of getting a run around every time i call to complain..I think it is high time for a Class Action Suit to be filed as we are paying good money for really bad service!! I honestly have had Dial Up that was faster then Their so called DSL.. just tonight i got these speeds and it about makes me sick..
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1189661117.png
I’m 90% certain it has to do with packet shaping/dropping. One of the fallouts of the Comcast lawsuit was that it is legal for ISP’s to route traffic on their networks as they please. This was intended to slow down and reduce the bandwidth of those using file sharing software. However, they weren’t allowed to drop packets as they pleased.
Now Frontier uses this freely on any large, continuous download. I have had my downloads dropped for game installations, Netflix, and even downloading the newest Linux distro.
Frontier does offer a video streaming service too, which is in competition with Netflix. On average my connection drops or slows after 10-20 minutes while watching Netflix. Funny thing though, the rest of the computers in the house keep on humming along at the usual Internet speed.
So I highly doubt the Wii is the problem. All devices in my house which run Netflix suffer the same fate. Basically, Frontier is trying to frustrate your Netflix experience to the point you drop Netflix and consider Frontier TV.
Just to echo what everyone else has been saying, except I am from Indiana. Totally unstable speeds, techs can’t do anything “all the tests came back normal”. While I’m stuck trying to stream video at 200-700 kbps (used to ALWAYS get 1.48 with verizon before they took over).
Cable here I come…
Many of theses speeds in these comments are unacceptably low. Nice technicians do not solve trouble, knowledgeable ones do.
DSL is highly susceptible to “bridge tap”. Bridge tap is short lengths of wire in parallel with the DSL line, commonly existing inside your own home wiring infrastructure. The further away fron the CO the bridge tap is, the more it can affect DSL speeds. Since DSL is an economical solution to HS internet access, does it not behoove one to do a little checking into your own household wiring harness?
Try moving a DSL filter out to the phone box outside, but be careful not to put a filter on the pair of wires feeding the DSL modem. In other words, feed the modem prior to the filter, and feed the rest of the house wiring after the filter.
Frequently, a prudent technician will replace the box outside with a special “NID”(network interface device) specially equipped with a master DSL filter, to effectively (electronically) remove the local bridge tap from the circuit. If you do not have this data NID on your house, request the tech to install one.
Wow, my wife and I have been wondering if we suffered from a powerplant radioactive plume passing by. Same and same again. We are home all day and into the evening…no matter the time of day we get horrible down/up load times for files, refresh to reload the page so it will function. I waited 5 min. for the speedtest.frontier.net to begin…walked away in disgust came back later and received “Download Test Error” message. I have not called them yet but, the no money for poor service sounds good. To think I used to complain about dial-up dropping to 10kbps on downloads…oh for the good old days. I’ve seen the spped drop to 4kbps on download with DSL! We use one PC RJ45 connected to the router and one Laptop via wireless, both are the same…slowwww.
I might add this began approx. a month ago but, when it was verizon (before Frontier bought out the service here) we didn’t suffer like this unless, I had a virus, etc.
Hi all,
I’m having the same issues as everyone above Our internet ran fine until about 2 months ago and all of the sudden it started taking 20 minutes to download a 3 minute song from itunes. My kids are suffering, they can’t watch videos or even talk to friends from skype. I honestly have to say when our contract is up in August we will be moving to another service. Frontier has sent two technitions and still no results…. Switching to cable internet ASAP!
I have had the luxory of being a customer with Frontier since 1999, they have received well over $ 150 to $ 300 a month from me since 1999. I know the service repair number without having to look it up. (that’s a bad thing) no one knows their telephone repair service number in their head unless they use it regularly. I only know fast dsl service whn I go to my Business and to my Dad’s house, Netflix movies (are you klidding!!) last night I tried to let the Grnad kids watch a movie it would not even load.
I would love to know a by pass or a way to use my own modem or some way to speed the service that I pay over $ 134.00 a month for, which is more that my husband pays for his business line and it has fast service windstream wireless modem, and it never skips a beat when palying a video or watching a movie. It’s embarassing, and so overpriced, no matter what you tell them same answer will send someon out they do it, not on their end must be in the lines cant find inside cant find outside.
if you want dsl they corner the market in my area.
I agree. Since Frontier took over Verizon in So. Ill. it has been pathetic. The technician (again, no complaints with service techs) ran the line tests, and they are all fine, and the speed test. He says that southern Illinois is getting gypped on speed b/c we get all our b/w from Chicago, and it loses “speed” as it filters down here. This results in no internet after 6 pm at our house. He says that Frontier is installing some “thing” that will increase speeds back up to normal in the next month or two.
The funny thing is, I live one block from my office. I pay for slightly faster internet speed there, and I have shown absolutely no lag throughout all of this at that location. Needless to say, as my husband is completing his Master’s degree, he is having to spend a lot of time at my office on the internet. The service tech says this is because my office is on the same street as the Frontier hub, and I suck b/w from the main line, but my house is only one block off????
Needless to say, we didn’t pay for March’s internet, and we shall not be paying for April. This crap really peeves me.
I have been on Frontier DSL for 6 years now and live just 2 blocks away from our Central Office in town. Frontier is the only choice in town for phone and Internet. We are in Southwest Minnesota and everyone I talk to from the region for the past fe months is complaining that Frontier has gotten slow. I have gone from speeds close to the 2 Mbps Advertised Download Speed of my service that I was able to obtain most of the time over the past 6 years until the first part of February. Since then our Internet has been down several time and I am lucky to ever get anything more than 128 Kbps to the Frontier Speedtest Server in Lakville, Minnesota… The local technicians are great and helpful, but when you call into the help desk and corporate you just get the run around and nothing ever gets done.
If I had the choice I would be off of Frontier in a heartbeat, but there is nothing else in town… Obviously they know it too.
Hell yes it is darn slow tonight @ 1:06 in the morning 4/6/2011. I am about ready to tell frontier to either fix it period or release me from my contract. I am about ready to go to Charter Internet service.If they do not fix it I am going to the FCC!!!!
Your luck, at 2000+kbs. Mine maxes at about 200kbs. I hate frontier. It is really slow all of the time but will frontier do anything? Nope.