• Concurring Statement of FTC Commissioner Noah Joshua Phillips regarding

    From Bill Horne@21:1/5 to All on Mon May 9 22:16:17 2022
    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.

    https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/public-statements/concurring-statement-commissioner-noah-joshua-phillips-regarding-frontier-communications-corp-et-al

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  • From Michael Trew@21:1/5 to Bill Horne on Mon May 9 23:08:35 2022
    On 5/9/2022 18:16, Bill Horne wrote:

    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.

    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.

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