Frontier rings in Verizon takeover by borking its network Frontier Communications says that problems related to its takeover of Verizon's internet service led to outages across the three most populous states in the country yesterday. The company told The Register that errors related to the handover caused a failure early this morning in California, Texas and Florida. Making matters …
...they are by no means another AT&T.
I have Frontier DSL at my home halfway up an Oregon mountain - other than carrier pigeons, it's my only option.
I've always found the Frontier customer service to be excellent. If I have an issue, they solve it quickly, and they're totally cool about me using my own equipment rather than the modem they supplied.
If they have a fault, it's that - by their own admission - some of their back end systems for billing are erratic. It took several calls to get an over-billing corrected on a family member's fiber connection; the call center staff knew immediately what was going on, and wanted to be helpful, but were stymied by the billing system's obduracy.
...but just enough. Our experience here on the other coast has been mixed. When they took over a couple of years ago, they cut off landline service to an 87-yo friend. When called on it, they said they'd be happy to reinstate it with a new number. It took some days to get that straightened out; our landline had a few glitches, they tried to raise the rate for us, &c. The blogosphere shows we were not alone in tribulations. It was so bad that we bought a share of their stock solely so we could go to the shareholders' meeting and complain personally. Since they took over, I've been getting a lot more dropped HTML connections, but they always clear up on retry so I haven't been stoked enough to call about it. But, the change was coincident with their takeover, to the day.
That said, things have stabilized in the last year or so, and I've got my fingers crossed.
I am not at all surprised that Frontier bunged things up. Most of their network is the old General Telephone & Electronics network (GTE) which was better know as Generally Terrible Experience. We're on Frontier where we live and as far as the internet is concerned, it like being a 1990s island surrounded by a 21st century ocean.
I was at work when this happened, for a large company with offices all over the USA. Wound up with issues affecting several hundred of our offices (over 150 in California alone). I went ahead and sent this article to my managers for reference.
On a personal note, I've got Frontier internet at home, and haven't really had much issue with their service. When I have, they've been pretty quick to get things resolved if they can. As for a lot of the issues that we have with internet here on this side of the pond, though, a surprising amount of our infrastructure is running across 150-year-old copper wires (give or take a decade or two). If anything, it's a miracle that things like this don't happen more often.
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