As Verizon builds their FiOS network, they’ve sold off their landline and DSL business in many markets to Frontier. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it has been for Nick and other former Verizon customers in his town in West Virginia. Their connection speed fell to one-sixth of what it was with Verizon. The speed has improved recently, but they’ve traded consistent slowness for intermittent outages. Nick can now stay online for about two minutes at a time.

I’m one of a number of former Verizon customers in my town in West Virginia that have been unhappy with their Internet service since Frontier moved into town. Soon after Frontier took over, the 3Mbps down/0.7Mbps up connections that we had been paying for became 0.5Mbps down/0.7Mbps up connections or worse. Some online applications wouldn’t work at that speed, and streaming video was just something that wasn’t attempted. Frontier seems to be fixing things slowly, connections now approach the paid-for speeds some times, but that seems to have brought new problems. Now my connections are disconnecting within 2 minutes, making it even more difficult to get things done before.

When I called Frontier tech support for this issue – I’ve called them enough by now to know most of their scripts – their solution was to schedule a technician in 4 days and for me to wait until next week to call about the issue again. Beyond the typical inconveniences of a week without Internet, it’s making it near impossible to complete research for my graduate thesis.

So what do you all think? Am I overreacting? Is being without a service for which I’m paying for a week acceptable? I’d like to write more, but I better hit send before my connection goes out again.

Nick sent another (brief) e-mail answering our question about when Frontier took over. He’s tried to be patient and wait for things to improve, but it’s enough to try any loyal customer’s patience.

Frontier took over Verizon’s operations here on July 1 of last year. West Virginia was part of that multi-state $8.6 billion deal between the two companies.

I had been hoping that Frontier would get things sorted out and put up with it until a couple months ago; that’s when I started calling tech support. Any time that they’ve had to send a technician – 3 times to my house – it’s been a week before they could schedule it, always with an apology from the phone technician that “they have had a lot of problems in West Virginia and are backlogged.”

The state Public Service Commission might want to hear about the huge speed decrease, outages, and useless tech support. They’ll be even more interested if any of Nick’s friends and neighbors are landline customers who have experienced problems or outages.

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