5 ms·

Frontier is about to offer 7-gig fiber across several states

38 points by rntn 2y ago

christkv 2y ago
I always laugh at these offerings. Even 1gb symmetrical. Most people pay for this and then run it through the cheap Wifi router the ISP gives you that will max out at 100 mbit.
- FredPret 2y ago
  This comes with a wifi 7 router
  - christkv 2y ago
    I will be surprised if you can leverage all the bandwidth even with wifi 7. Performance will probably drop off a cliff once you move a little away from the point and in cities the interference from your neighbours will probably mean you actual speed is way lower than the theoretical speed.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      You shouldn't have tons of interference on 5 and 6 GHz. Even without wifi 7 and just using 5GHz, I think your estimate of 100mbit and that gigabit is too much for wifi is overly pessimistic.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      If you need this speed you should be hardwired not of wifi IMHO. Great for servers. Preferably use fiber to the servers not 10gb Ethernet. I've been meaning to run fiber to my outbuildings, may as well go 10gb+ for that, it doesn't cost much more.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        If I don't have to run fiber and still get acceptable performance, it's just more convenient. Question is, how does it do in the rain and/or with trees/hills/buildings in the way?
        bluGill 2y ago
        why are you using 7g if you don't need speed? Wifi 7 can maybe keep up but it has distance limitations and so fiber is better. of course if performance is accaptable is the real question. But if you are happy on wifi you can be satisfied with a cheaper plan, or so I'm guessing
    - fragmede 2y ago
      Where the theoretical max speed for Wifi 7 is something ludicrous, if I can only get 800 Mibps actual speed I'm not going to cry that hard. Wifi 6's max speed is also stupid fast compared to most consumer Internet connections.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  At $309/month, something tells me the plan is only going to be of interest to the technically savvy.
- dylan604 2y ago
  Yes, this my first knee jerk reaction as well. Just because the fiber is cable of a speed does not mean that you will receive that speed. Unless you are trying to serve multiple devices simultaneous, there's very few things that will support that bandwidth. Even trying to use the AWS CLI to move data to/from a bucket will not saturate my available bandwidth.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    Being too fast to easily saturate is a benefit. It keeps your ping low.
- Jnr 2y ago
  In Europe we have had gigabit at home for 8+ years (and it is cheap - 15$/month), and gigabit routers are provided by the ISP, why wouldn't it be the same everywhere else. It is not like gigabit is state of the art anymore, we are now starting to upgrade to 10 gigabit at home, 1 gigabit routers are cheap, and ISP's buy them in bulk.
  - christkv 2y ago
    It’s not the wired speed it’s that most people only use it with WiFi anyway so they get no benefit of the full available bandwidth. Most people don’t have their house wired for CAT6 or better
    - Jnr 2y ago
      You need only CAT5e for gigabit. And ISP's are giving out gen5 and gen6 Wi-Fi devices.
- rjsw 2y ago
  I am using the router my ISP provided, a Technicolor one, it happily handles over 500mb/s in both directions for a service sold as 500.
- Lammma 2y ago
  You shouldn't because you clearly don't understand it. If good/faster fiber is easily available to everyone, this also includes people or organizations who need it and benefit from it. Also just because you coulduse it, doesn't mean you need to but fiber as a technology is a lot better than copper which is the main reason why we had slow internet for ages. Fiber has a lot less issues with powerlines (basically none). Its a lot faster, you can have a lot longer lines without performance degredation like dsl or vdsl. And if these people actually need to upgrade, they can just buy a new Wifi router or use a cable. But with a slow copper line, they don't have any option.
ericcumbee 2y ago
Frontier is one of the worst Telcos I've ever dealt with. A friend had their ADSL Service. Something went wrong the lines in her area. They gave her a 4 month ETA on the restoration of service. They tried to tell her she had to continue paying her bill while she had no service and once service was restored they would consider a partial credit. They were content to just let their Copper network rot, and didn't start doing fiber until there was state and federal money to do it. meanwhile our local Telephone CO-OP went all in on fiber years ago and now offers 8gb Fiber to your door for about 175 a month.
- Arainach 2y ago
  Hard disagree. For most of a decade they've provided me with reliable symmetric gigabit fiber with only one slight price increase of $10 more per month. Meanwhile my neighbors on Comcast have to call every single year to try to convince another support representative to not increase their price by 20%.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    You're both right. Frontier bought up established infrastructure. Where that purchase was DSL nearing end of life, Frontier neglects much of the network. West Virginia and the NorthEast US are degrading by the day. Verizon's FiOS was very well engineered and Frontier acquired it near the beginning of it's life. Even there Frontier spends less than Verizon did. They abandoned Verizon's IPv6 deployment, for example.
  - ericcumbee 2y ago
    I'm sure its different in more metropolitan areas. this is in rural Georgia near Savannah.
- bbatha 2y ago
  They didn't even start a build out initially, they bought most of their fiber from Verizon. Which ironically sent them into bankruptcy.
- Mountain_Skies 2y ago
tmaly 2y ago
My development doesn’t have above ground wiring. All the Frontier fiber options in my area are not available to me. Comcast xfinity is the only option.
1123581321 2y ago
We have an 8 gig option through i3 fiber in Illinois. I’ve no need, but it does have me wanting to get there with 10 gigabit networking equipment. Also, as an anchor price, it’s assuring that 1 and 2 gigs are easy. For other Illinois readers, i3 customer support and the installation were excellent. After Comcast it’s been refreshing to just pick up the phone or start a live chat and immediately talk to a human with agency. And they do deliver the promised symmetrical speeds.
mmastrac 2y ago
I consider myself on the higher end of bandwidth consumption, but it's challenging to see myself ever saturating a 7Gb link. I've been struggling to get 10G working in my house -- 2.5Gb sort-of works, but there's just so much equipment to upgrade in the meantime. I had to get a fibre link installed just to connect two parts of my network together and doing that as a regular-joe consumer is practically impossible. I wonder if they are counting on the fact that it's practically un-saturable as a home user.
- dylan604 2y ago
  I'd imagine SOHO situations are the the most likely to benefit not Joey Gamer. It also really feels like more of a commercial vs residential offering. Unless your house is running a camming website where multiple feeds are being pushed simultaneously. We all have different hobbies
  - mmastrac 2y ago
    My hobby includes a lot of large docker images, self-hosting a somewhat popular website, and attempting to get my file server serving as quickly as possible to the other places in my house. I use a reasonable amount of bandwidth in my WFH job (and my partner does as well), but we're just barely topping out a 300Mbit connection right now. I think we could make use of gigabit during the burstiest periods, however.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      An internal file server used on your local net has nothing to do with WAN speeds though. If you have a residential account, most of those actually exclude running a server with external public access on those accounts, but many people are not aware of that specific fine print.
      - mmastrac 2y ago
        Well yeah, obviously LAN and WAN are different. But they're all running over that same LAN fabric to get to the WAN. Having high-speed streaming access to files on the server is somewhat important as well (mostly while travelling). With Cloudflare access my file server and website are available without being detectable to the ISP, though I actually do have a static IP + hosting plan through an interesting ISP called Skyway West in Canada.
darknavi 2y ago
I am thankful every day that Ziply Fiber bought out Frontier in the PNW. They offer up to 50Gbps service and are rock solid (at least at my 2Gbps plan). They are active on reddit (or was when I used to use it), have a YouTube channel, and even offered tours of their switch buildings to fans! https://www.youtube.com/c/ZiplyFiber https://www.youtube.com/c/ZiplyFiber
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  Yeah, I'm on a Ziply 1 gbps plan and I probably have less than 2 hours of downtime per year. Usually, when I DO have downtime, it's just a hiccup that I resolve by rebooting the router, and when it finishes, I find myself with a new WAN IP. It's like my DHCP lease expires but my router doesn't know. I don't even know what I would do with 2 gigabit, let alone 7 or 20. Even with gigabit, the only time I really take advantage of it is downloading a new game. Streaming video requires only what, 20-30 megabit?
  - darknavi 2y ago
    2Gbps is nice for nightly off-site backups and occasional file sharing with friends and family, but it's totally overkill for me.
  - mike503 2y ago
    Ziply was amazing. Fios was always great from Verizon to Frontier to Ziply.
mcbuilder 2y ago
I live in Chattanooga, TN and it seems like a better deal ($300 if you want a 10Gb link, with other decent low cost options. It really seems like the rest of the US has missed the boat with municipal ISPs. As others said, you really need to upgrade your home LAN to get much of a boost. I splurged on a nice Intel NIC with quad 10Gb RJ45 ports, and am running a OpenSense router in a VM. I now need a nice 10Gb switch to make the most of, since everything downstream from the router is on 1Gb speed.
throwaway13337 2y ago
Does it come with a static IP? I have a 400 megabit upload speed which is more than a lot of the VPS services I use in practice. However, the IP sometimes changes without warning. No way to get a static one without business pricing which is an order of magnitude more. I'd like to run my servers locally. I cannot imagine much use for more than 200 megabit. I know Alan Kay preaches that you need to be living in the future to invent the future in a technical way. But I don't believe it. The things we need today don't seem to more and faster but better organization of the tech we already have. We're absolutely in the stone age with software architecture, organizational structures, and communication technology that helps (and not hurts) humanity. We've got a lot work to do here. Peer to peer networking enabled by reasonable upload speeds could help here. But still, you need a static IP to make it practical.
- betaby 2y ago
  I have A/AAAA records set dynamically for my home connection. Granted I don't host anything that requires 99.99% uptime at home.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  I get a mostly static IP that cycles when the power goes out long enough (central florida location). I use Cloudflare, Tailscale and DDNS, works fine for my uses. Importantly, it’s not CGNAT like T-Mobile Home Internet or Metronet, which makes inbound services significantly more challenging. $40/month for 500Mb symmetrical. Anything important is in a rack at a colo facility.
bdavisx 2y ago
Anecdotal, but in my area (Central US-IL), we had Verizon as the telco many years ago and we had Verizon DSL (Comcast was the only other choice at the time). We had only 1 issue w/ Verizon and it was fixed quickly. Frontier bought them out and they could not keep DSL working at all. Problem after problem that they couldn't fix. So we switched to Comcast - that's how bad Frontier was. Now we use Metronet and I'm waiting for that to get completely enshitified since they were purchased by TMobile or someone like that. I hope i3 is available in our area, I'm guessing if it's not, they'll be moving in as Metronet goes to shit.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  https://www.metronet.com/blog/press-release/t-mobile-and-kkr-announce-joint-venture-to-acquire-metronet https://www.metronet.com/blog/press-release/t-mobile-and-kkr... (“T-Mobile and KKR Announce Joint Venture to Acquire Metronet and Offer Leading Fiber Solution to More U.S. Consumers”) Time to champion municipal/coop fiber in your area.
maerF0x0 2y ago
My first thought was "From their planes???" [1] But for real. Seeing as most consumers are using WiFi, a quick google suggests the fastest WiFi standard is 1.3Gbps, what is the usecase besides super users who are willing to wire everything? (Is that 1.3Gbps per device and so a combo of devices can use 7gig?) [1]: for those not in the US -- "Frontier [airlines]" is a ultra low cost airline
- zamadatix 2y ago
  I get > 2 Gbps goodput on my Wi-Fi but I think you're right that this $310/m offering is aimed squarely at similar power users. 10G-PON uses the same stuff at the back end regardless if they offer 1.1 Gbps or 7 Gbps service so they might as well offer the larger pipe if they can.
- Lammma 2y ago
  WiFi development doesn't stop. We also don't know when we need more. When corona hit, a lot of people realized that there normal internet speed was not enough. Fiber availability means also a general better availability for people, companies or other organizations to have it when needed (a more rural school for example). I can also see a future with robots: Imagine you are old and need help. But you only need help a few hours a day for food, cleaning etc. Buy a robot, have someone remote help you through using the robot (video streaming, spacial data streaming, voice, audio etc.)
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Directionally that's true, but as a counterexample, I've never really had a need for anything > 10 Mbit/s while working from home, and maybe 50 Mbit/s for VOD streaming in the evening. Much more important than high peak data rates was getting those 10 Mbit/s consistently throughout the workday, and in both uplink as well as downlink. For that, top speeds per individual connection are almost meaningless; what matters is a not-oversubscribed network. I nominally got 1 Gbit/s, but during Covid often saw that slow down to 0.3 Mbit/s during business hours. I'd much rather pay for 100 Mbit/s with an SLA (maybe something like "at least 50 Mbit/s to your city's top three POPs at the 99th percentile or you don't pay for the entire month"?) than for "up to 7 Gigabit!!!" with none.
mdaniel 2y ago
> Unlimited Data I think they left off the usual provider's asterisk next to that bullet point, or they're hoping to have so few customers that know what to do with that amount of throughput that only the long tail customers would use it
- darknavi 2y ago
  From my experience fiber-oriented ISPs don't really care about bandwidth usage because they don't over-provision their network nearly as bad as copper-based ones.
steviedotboston 2y ago
Wild, I knew Frontier as an ISP in upstate NY that only provided DSL service with abysmal speeds. I assumed they would just die off, but I guess not.
jccalhoun 2y ago
The local company laid fiber in my neighborhood last year and still won't take my money. I guess they are waiting for a certain number of people to sign up before they light up the fiber. It is just a few yards away! Take my money!
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
Google Fiber offers 8 Gbps in Austin for half the price. They're also piloting 20 Gbps in some areas.[0] I wished it were available where I live because the only maximum options currently available are 1 Gbps through either GVEC (fiber) or Spectrum (cable). Spectrum is slow and has outages occasionally. GVEC lacks useful information on their website and hides pricing. 0. https://fiber.google.com/gfiber-labs/20gig https://fiber.google.com/gfiber-labs/20gig
- mysteria 2y ago
  Anything beyond 10 Gbps is basically the datacenter world and the switches, NICs, etc. are going to be real expensive. I wonder if their terms allow hosting on that 20Gbps plan as that's probably the only real use for it.
- trashcan 2y ago
  They also refuse to do installs in new builds in many neighborhoods. I have lived sandwiched between two addresses that have Google Fiber, and they have refused to come out to install the last 25 feet of cable to my house for 5 years. So I'm paying $100/mo for crappy Spectrum internet that goes down all the time. I've reached out to them several times to come out or do a survey, or run the existing fiber through already existing conduit and they just refuse.
doublepg23 2y ago
I'm curious what people with >1Gbps service are running for their home networks. I'm setting up a bunch of new Unifi gear 90% of it is 1Gbps speed, this is prosumer gear too so I'm wondering where people are buying cheap 10GbE equipment.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  These services tend to come with a box that'll do your NAT so you just need some dumb ports. I started with a MikroTik 4 port 10G for ~$130 to be able to connect a NAS, my main PC, and my Wi-Fi since the box it came with didn't have that many high speed ports. The rest can go into the 1G ports or on a standard 1G switch. Since then I've picked up a cheap piece of shit 8 port 10G on Aliexpress for ~$100. Works surprisingly well.
  - doublepg23 2y ago
    Oh duh, yeah I guess most devices don't support/need 10Gb so why not just use 10Gb in a couple places - good point.
throw0101d 2y ago
> Frontier is bringing its new 7-gig fiber internet option to customers across the country. The 7-gig plan costs $309.99 / month and is the fastest widely available fiber plan so far. I'm not against 'progress' generally per se, but I think that you're reaching diminishing returns >1 Gbps, and that's quite the price tag, especially compared to: > Google Fiber has a $150 / month 8Gbps plan, but it’s only available in select cities, such as San Antonio, Texas; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Mesa, Arizona. From a strictly societal utilitarian perspective, I would think that going for more ubiquitous fibre coverage would be better. Back in the last century/millennium, there was a mass push to having electricity and telephone connections everywhere, and I'd like to see the same thing done with fibre Internet—ideally owned by local government, with Layer 3 being provided by companies: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network
- zamadatix 2y ago
  The cost to deploy 1G-PON and 10G-PON are very close to the point if you're talking about deploying fiber it doesn't really change the viability.
  - throw0101d 2y ago
    They're already at 50 Gbps: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Speed_PON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Speed_PON (G.9804) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_in_the_first_mile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_in_the_first_mile The main point is to deploy fibre everywhere, and not necessarily which service speed is offered. (A separate question is whether to go with PON or with 'active' networking.)
    - zamadatix 2y ago
      Those higher speed PON can actually be a lot more expensive to deploy right now, though they eventually come down with time of course. Deploying active direct fiber everywhere would be quite the undertaking in terms of funding. I agree though the goal should be to deploy fiber everywhere. I was just responding whether or not it's utilitarian to roll out the higher speeds like 7G while waiting for that - it is at it costs next to $0 on the infrastructure side for the areas already having the fiber independent of resources we dump into rolling out more fiber.
theideaofcoffee 2y ago
I love seeing developments like this, and while Frontier wouldn't be my first choice in provider, it's a good thing that even a historically poor performer like Frontier is pushing the boundary a bit. What I don't love seeing is the same, predictable responses every time something like this is posted. It's always the same: "oh, they'll never be able to deliver", "their subscribers will never use it, why don't they stick with 50/10", "I get by just fine on my 100Kbps ADSL", "why would anyone want to stream video". I get it, as tech people, we're predisposed to being skeptical and questioning, but why the hostility to progress? Okay then, let's just stick with dialup, because that's only anything anyone will ever need, apparently. We should be celebrating anything that pushes the art forward. The demand will be induced, the pipes will be filled. Let's think about applications that can actually take advantage of new capabilities like this, instead of pooh-poohing every little bit of change.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
For clarification: Frontier's rural, degrading DSL is a physically larger (though less dense) footprint than the FiOS they bought from Verizon. That DSL continues to rot in place. Unless something has changed recently, there are no meaningful plans to ever upgrade it to fiber. My personal position is that customers in outlying areas deserve worthwhile, reliable internet access - even if that reduces shareholder dividends and executive bonuses.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
The article says Frontier currently offers fiber internet in most of the 25 states it serves. This is a weird way of saying it's in 18 states. The vast majority Frontier's FiOS is in California, Texas, Florida and New York. Frontier's little footprints in other states are basically them padding their resume.
nerdjon 2y ago
I am struggling to see a use case for more than 1gb up and down. Which I have with Fios right now. Very few things seem to go above 100mb (hard wired). The single exception I have seen is my Xbox which sometimes gets up to 500 when downloading a game. I guess if you have a big family and a lot of things are downloading or streaming at once, but are people really hitting a limit. Even Netflix’s recommendations are super low. It just seems like we have some pushes for these crazy speeds(maybe for marketing or increments) when the reality is the speeds to you will never utilize it. I feel like I am missing something for how you could possibly justify this in your home.
- ianburrell 2y ago
  I think it makes sense for offices where there are more people doing more things. It is expensive to use more than 1Gbps. Need router that can do 2.5GBps or 10GBps. For business have separate access points, need switches and APs that can do 2.5Gbps.
  - nerdjon 2y ago
    That I agree with, I guess I kinda always figured that businesses could already get internet at higher speed / bandwidth. Otherwise many offices would be abysmal.
- pokstad 2y ago
  The use cases might lag behind the infra. All the services we use today are designed around the constraint of lopsided upload/download bandwidth on broadband. If you build it, it will come.
  - nerdjon 2y ago
    I get what you are saying, but Fios launched their 1gb internet in 2017 and it feels like most services have been stuck at their specific speed since then. I was curious, so I just went to download the Windows 11 ISO from Microsoft. That is capping out at about 70 mbps. Downloading an almost 7gb file in 2 minutes. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying "oh we don't need this speed". But clearly things have not been changing. We have been past my current download speed from Microsoft being a minimum for a while.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

38 points by rntn 2y ago

I always laugh at these offerings. Even 1gb symmetrical. Most people pay for this and then run it through the cheap Wifi router the ISP gives you that will max out at 100 mbit.

FredPret 2y ago
This comes with a wifi 7 router
- christkv 2y ago
  I will be surprised if you can leverage all the bandwidth even with wifi 7. Performance will probably drop off a cliff once you move a little away from the point and in cities the interference from your neighbours will probably mean you actual speed is way lower than the theoretical speed.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    You shouldn't have tons of interference on 5 and 6 GHz. Even without wifi 7 and just using 5GHz, I think your estimate of 100mbit and that gigabit is too much for wifi is overly pessimistic.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    If you need this speed you should be hardwired not of wifi IMHO. Great for servers. Preferably use fiber to the servers not 10gb Ethernet. I've been meaning to run fiber to my outbuildings, may as well go 10gb+ for that, it doesn't cost much more.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      If I don't have to run fiber and still get acceptable performance, it's just more convenient. Question is, how does it do in the rain and/or with trees/hills/buildings in the way?
      - bluGill 2y ago
        why are you using 7g if you don't need speed? Wifi 7 can maybe keep up but it has distance limitations and so fiber is better. of course if performance is accaptable is the real question. But if you are happy on wifi you can be satisfied with a cheaper plan, or so I'm guessing
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Where the theoretical max speed for Wifi 7 is something ludicrous, if I can only get 800 Mibps actual speed I'm not going to cry that hard. Wifi 6's max speed is also stupid fast compared to most consumer Internet connections.
0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
At $309/month, something tells me the plan is only going to be of interest to the technically savvy.
dylan604 2y ago
Yes, this my first knee jerk reaction as well. Just because the fiber is cable of a speed does not mean that you will receive that speed. Unless you are trying to serve multiple devices simultaneous, there's very few things that will support that bandwidth. Even trying to use the AWS CLI to move data to/from a bucket will not saturate my available bandwidth.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  Being too fast to easily saturate is a benefit. It keeps your ping low.
Jnr 2y ago
In Europe we have had gigabit at home for 8+ years (and it is cheap - 15$/month), and gigabit routers are provided by the ISP, why wouldn't it be the same everywhere else. It is not like gigabit is state of the art anymore, we are now starting to upgrade to 10 gigabit at home, 1 gigabit routers are cheap, and ISP's buy them in bulk.
- christkv 2y ago
  It’s not the wired speed it’s that most people only use it with WiFi anyway so they get no benefit of the full available bandwidth. Most people don’t have their house wired for CAT6 or better
  - Jnr 2y ago
    You need only CAT5e for gigabit. And ISP's are giving out gen5 and gen6 Wi-Fi devices.
rjsw 2y ago
I am using the router my ISP provided, a Technicolor one, it happily handles over 500mb/s in both directions for a service sold as 500.
Lammma 2y ago
You shouldn't because you clearly don't understand it. If good/faster fiber is easily available to everyone, this also includes people or organizations who need it and benefit from it. Also just because you coulduse it, doesn't mean you need to but fiber as a technology is a lot better than copper which is the main reason why we had slow internet for ages. Fiber has a lot less issues with powerlines (basically none). Its a lot faster, you can have a lot longer lines without performance degredation like dsl or vdsl. And if these people actually need to upgrade, they can just buy a new Wifi router or use a cable. But with a slow copper line, they don't have any option.

ericcumbee 2y ago

Frontier is one of the worst Telcos I've ever dealt with. A friend had their ADSL Service. Something went wrong the lines in her area. They gave her a 4 month ETA on the restoration of service. They tried to tell her she had to continue paying her bill while she had no service and once service was restored they would consider a partial credit. They were content to just let their Copper network rot, and didn't start doing fiber until there was state and federal money to do it. meanwhile our local Telephone CO-OP went all in on fiber years ago and now offers 8gb Fiber to your door for about 175 a month.

Arainach 2y ago
Hard disagree. For most of a decade they've provided me with reliable symmetric gigabit fiber with only one slight price increase of $10 more per month. Meanwhile my neighbors on Comcast have to call every single year to try to convince another support representative to not increase their price by 20%.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  You're both right. Frontier bought up established infrastructure. Where that purchase was DSL nearing end of life, Frontier neglects much of the network. West Virginia and the NorthEast US are degrading by the day. Verizon's FiOS was very well engineered and Frontier acquired it near the beginning of it's life. Even there Frontier spends less than Verizon did. They abandoned Verizon's IPv6 deployment, for example.
- ericcumbee 2y ago
  I'm sure its different in more metropolitan areas. this is in rural Georgia near Savannah.
bbatha 2y ago
They didn't even start a build out initially, they bought most of their fiber from Verizon. Which ironically sent them into bankruptcy.
Mountain_Skies 2y ago

tmaly 2y ago

My development doesn’t have above ground wiring. All the Frontier fiber options in my area are not available to me. Comcast xfinity is the only option.

1123581321 2y ago

We have an 8 gig option through i3 fiber in Illinois. I’ve no need, but it does have me wanting to get there with 10 gigabit networking equipment. Also, as an anchor price, it’s assuring that 1 and 2 gigs are easy. For other Illinois readers, i3 customer support and the installation were excellent. After Comcast it’s been refreshing to just pick up the phone or start a live chat and immediately talk to a human with agency. And they do deliver the promised symmetrical speeds.

mmastrac 2y ago

I consider myself on the higher end of bandwidth consumption, but it's challenging to see myself ever saturating a 7Gb link. I've been struggling to get 10G working in my house -- 2.5Gb sort-of works, but there's just so much equipment to upgrade in the meantime. I had to get a fibre link installed just to connect two parts of my network together and doing that as a regular-joe consumer is practically impossible. I wonder if they are counting on the fact that it's practically un-saturable as a home user.

dylan604 2y ago
I'd imagine SOHO situations are the the most likely to benefit not Joey Gamer. It also really feels like more of a commercial vs residential offering. Unless your house is running a camming website where multiple feeds are being pushed simultaneously. We all have different hobbies
- mmastrac 2y ago
  My hobby includes a lot of large docker images, self-hosting a somewhat popular website, and attempting to get my file server serving as quickly as possible to the other places in my house. I use a reasonable amount of bandwidth in my WFH job (and my partner does as well), but we're just barely topping out a 300Mbit connection right now. I think we could make use of gigabit during the burstiest periods, however.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    An internal file server used on your local net has nothing to do with WAN speeds though. If you have a residential account, most of those actually exclude running a server with external public access on those accounts, but many people are not aware of that specific fine print.
    - mmastrac 2y ago
      Well yeah, obviously LAN and WAN are different. But they're all running over that same LAN fabric to get to the WAN. Having high-speed streaming access to files on the server is somewhat important as well (mostly while travelling). With Cloudflare access my file server and website are available without being detectable to the ISP, though I actually do have a static IP + hosting plan through an interesting ISP called Skyway West in Canada.

darknavi 2y ago

I am thankful every day that Ziply Fiber bought out Frontier in the PNW. They offer up to 50Gbps service and are rock solid (at least at my 2Gbps plan). They are active on reddit (or was when I used to use it), have a YouTube channel, and even offered tours of their switch buildings to fans! https://www.youtube.com/c/ZiplyFiber https://www.youtube.com/c/ZiplyFiber

Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
Yeah, I'm on a Ziply 1 gbps plan and I probably have less than 2 hours of downtime per year. Usually, when I DO have downtime, it's just a hiccup that I resolve by rebooting the router, and when it finishes, I find myself with a new WAN IP. It's like my DHCP lease expires but my router doesn't know. I don't even know what I would do with 2 gigabit, let alone 7 or 20. Even with gigabit, the only time I really take advantage of it is downloading a new game. Streaming video requires only what, 20-30 megabit?
- darknavi 2y ago
  2Gbps is nice for nightly off-site backups and occasional file sharing with friends and family, but it's totally overkill for me.
- mike503 2y ago
  Ziply was amazing. Fios was always great from Verizon to Frontier to Ziply.

mcbuilder 2y ago

I live in Chattanooga, TN and it seems like a better deal ($300 if you want a 10Gb link, with other decent low cost options. It really seems like the rest of the US has missed the boat with municipal ISPs. As others said, you really need to upgrade your home LAN to get much of a boost. I splurged on a nice Intel NIC with quad 10Gb RJ45 ports, and am running a OpenSense router in a VM. I now need a nice 10Gb switch to make the most of, since everything downstream from the router is on 1Gb speed.

throwaway13337 2y ago

Does it come with a static IP? I have a 400 megabit upload speed which is more than a lot of the VPS services I use in practice. However, the IP sometimes changes without warning. No way to get a static one without business pricing which is an order of magnitude more. I'd like to run my servers locally. I cannot imagine much use for more than 200 megabit. I know Alan Kay preaches that you need to be living in the future to invent the future in a technical way. But I don't believe it. The things we need today don't seem to more and faster but better organization of the tech we already have. We're absolutely in the stone age with software architecture, organizational structures, and communication technology that helps (and not hurts) humanity. We've got a lot work to do here. Peer to peer networking enabled by reasonable upload speeds could help here. But still, you need a static IP to make it practical.

betaby 2y ago
I have A/AAAA records set dynamically for my home connection. Granted I don't host anything that requires 99.99% uptime at home.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
I get a mostly static IP that cycles when the power goes out long enough (central florida location). I use Cloudflare, Tailscale and DDNS, works fine for my uses. Importantly, it’s not CGNAT like T-Mobile Home Internet or Metronet, which makes inbound services significantly more challenging. $40/month for 500Mb symmetrical. Anything important is in a rack at a colo facility.

bdavisx 2y ago

Anecdotal, but in my area (Central US-IL), we had Verizon as the telco many years ago and we had Verizon DSL (Comcast was the only other choice at the time). We had only 1 issue w/ Verizon and it was fixed quickly. Frontier bought them out and they could not keep DSL working at all. Problem after problem that they couldn't fix. So we switched to Comcast - that's how bad Frontier was. Now we use Metronet and I'm waiting for that to get completely enshitified since they were purchased by TMobile or someone like that. I hope i3 is available in our area, I'm guessing if it's not, they'll be moving in as Metronet goes to shit.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
https://www.metronet.com/blog/press-release/t-mobile-and-kkr-announce-joint-venture-to-acquire-metronet https://www.metronet.com/blog/press-release/t-mobile-and-kkr... (“T-Mobile and KKR Announce Joint Venture to Acquire Metronet and Offer Leading Fiber Solution to More U.S. Consumers”) Time to champion municipal/coop fiber in your area.

maerF0x0 2y ago

My first thought was "From their planes???" [1] But for real. Seeing as most consumers are using WiFi, a quick google suggests the fastest WiFi standard is 1.3Gbps, what is the usecase besides super users who are willing to wire everything? (Is that 1.3Gbps per device and so a combo of devices can use 7gig?) [1]: for those not in the US -- "Frontier [airlines]" is a ultra low cost airline

zamadatix 2y ago
I get > 2 Gbps goodput on my Wi-Fi but I think you're right that this $310/m offering is aimed squarely at similar power users. 10G-PON uses the same stuff at the back end regardless if they offer 1.1 Gbps or 7 Gbps service so they might as well offer the larger pipe if they can.
Lammma 2y ago
WiFi development doesn't stop. We also don't know when we need more. When corona hit, a lot of people realized that there normal internet speed was not enough. Fiber availability means also a general better availability for people, companies or other organizations to have it when needed (a more rural school for example). I can also see a future with robots: Imagine you are old and need help. But you only need help a few hours a day for food, cleaning etc. Buy a robot, have someone remote help you through using the robot (video streaming, spacial data streaming, voice, audio etc.)
- lxgr 2y ago
  Directionally that's true, but as a counterexample, I've never really had a need for anything > 10 Mbit/s while working from home, and maybe 50 Mbit/s for VOD streaming in the evening. Much more important than high peak data rates was getting those 10 Mbit/s consistently throughout the workday, and in both uplink as well as downlink. For that, top speeds per individual connection are almost meaningless; what matters is a not-oversubscribed network. I nominally got 1 Gbit/s, but during Covid often saw that slow down to 0.3 Mbit/s during business hours. I'd much rather pay for 100 Mbit/s with an SLA (maybe something like "at least 50 Mbit/s to your city's top three POPs at the 99th percentile or you don't pay for the entire month"?) than for "up to 7 Gigabit!!!" with none.

mdaniel 2y ago

> Unlimited Data I think they left off the usual provider's asterisk next to that bullet point, or they're hoping to have so few customers that know what to do with that amount of throughput that only the long tail customers would use it

darknavi 2y ago
From my experience fiber-oriented ISPs don't really care about bandwidth usage because they don't over-provision their network nearly as bad as copper-based ones.

steviedotboston 2y ago

Wild, I knew Frontier as an ISP in upstate NY that only provided DSL service with abysmal speeds. I assumed they would just die off, but I guess not.

jccalhoun 2y ago

The local company laid fiber in my neighborhood last year and still won't take my money. I guess they are waiting for a certain number of people to sign up before they light up the fiber. It is just a few yards away! Take my money!

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

Google Fiber offers 8 Gbps in Austin for half the price. They're also piloting 20 Gbps in some areas.[0] I wished it were available where I live because the only maximum options currently available are 1 Gbps through either GVEC (fiber) or Spectrum (cable). Spectrum is slow and has outages occasionally. GVEC lacks useful information on their website and hides pricing. 0. https://fiber.google.com/gfiber-labs/20gig https://fiber.google.com/gfiber-labs/20gig

mysteria 2y ago
Anything beyond 10 Gbps is basically the datacenter world and the switches, NICs, etc. are going to be real expensive. I wonder if their terms allow hosting on that 20Gbps plan as that's probably the only real use for it.
trashcan 2y ago
They also refuse to do installs in new builds in many neighborhoods. I have lived sandwiched between two addresses that have Google Fiber, and they have refused to come out to install the last 25 feet of cable to my house for 5 years. So I'm paying $100/mo for crappy Spectrum internet that goes down all the time. I've reached out to them several times to come out or do a survey, or run the existing fiber through already existing conduit and they just refuse.

doublepg23 2y ago

I'm curious what people with >1Gbps service are running for their home networks. I'm setting up a bunch of new Unifi gear 90% of it is 1Gbps speed, this is prosumer gear too so I'm wondering where people are buying cheap 10GbE equipment.

zamadatix 2y ago
These services tend to come with a box that'll do your NAT so you just need some dumb ports. I started with a MikroTik 4 port 10G for ~$130 to be able to connect a NAS, my main PC, and my Wi-Fi since the box it came with didn't have that many high speed ports. The rest can go into the 1G ports or on a standard 1G switch. Since then I've picked up a cheap piece of shit 8 port 10G on Aliexpress for ~$100. Works surprisingly well.
- doublepg23 2y ago
  Oh duh, yeah I guess most devices don't support/need 10Gb so why not just use 10Gb in a couple places - good point.

throw0101d 2y ago

> Frontier is bringing its new 7-gig fiber internet option to customers across the country. The 7-gig plan costs $309.99 / month and is the fastest widely available fiber plan so far. I'm not against 'progress' generally per se, but I think that you're reaching diminishing returns >1 Gbps, and that's quite the price tag, especially compared to: > Google Fiber has a $150 / month 8Gbps plan, but it’s only available in select cities, such as San Antonio, Texas; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Mesa, Arizona. From a strictly societal utilitarian perspective, I would think that going for more ubiquitous fibre coverage would be better. Back in the last century/millennium, there was a mass push to having electricity and telephone connections everywhere, and I'd like to see the same thing done with fibre Internet—ideally owned by local government, with Layer 3 being provided by companies: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network

zamadatix 2y ago
The cost to deploy 1G-PON and 10G-PON are very close to the point if you're talking about deploying fiber it doesn't really change the viability.
- throw0101d 2y ago
  They're already at 50 Gbps: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Speed_PON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Speed_PON (G.9804) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_in_the_first_mile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_in_the_first_mile The main point is to deploy fibre everywhere, and not necessarily which service speed is offered. (A separate question is whether to go with PON or with 'active' networking.)
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    Those higher speed PON can actually be a lot more expensive to deploy right now, though they eventually come down with time of course. Deploying active direct fiber everywhere would be quite the undertaking in terms of funding. I agree though the goal should be to deploy fiber everywhere. I was just responding whether or not it's utilitarian to roll out the higher speeds like 7G while waiting for that - it is at it costs next to $0 on the infrastructure side for the areas already having the fiber independent of resources we dump into rolling out more fiber.

theideaofcoffee 2y ago

I love seeing developments like this, and while Frontier wouldn't be my first choice in provider, it's a good thing that even a historically poor performer like Frontier is pushing the boundary a bit. What I don't love seeing is the same, predictable responses every time something like this is posted. It's always the same: "oh, they'll never be able to deliver", "their subscribers will never use it, why don't they stick with 50/10", "I get by just fine on my 100Kbps ADSL", "why would anyone want to stream video". I get it, as tech people, we're predisposed to being skeptical and questioning, but why the hostility to progress? Okay then, let's just stick with dialup, because that's only anything anyone will ever need, apparently. We should be celebrating anything that pushes the art forward. The demand will be induced, the pipes will be filled. Let's think about applications that can actually take advantage of new capabilities like this, instead of pooh-poohing every little bit of change.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

For clarification: Frontier's rural, degrading DSL is a physically larger (though less dense) footprint than the FiOS they bought from Verizon. That DSL continues to rot in place. Unless something has changed recently, there are no meaningful plans to ever upgrade it to fiber. My personal position is that customers in outlying areas deserve worthwhile, reliable internet access - even if that reduces shareholder dividends and executive bonuses.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

The article says Frontier currently offers fiber internet in most of the 25 states it serves. This is a weird way of saying it's in 18 states. The vast majority Frontier's FiOS is in California, Texas, Florida and New York. Frontier's little footprints in other states are basically them padding their resume.

nerdjon 2y ago

I am struggling to see a use case for more than 1gb up and down. Which I have with Fios right now. Very few things seem to go above 100mb (hard wired). The single exception I have seen is my Xbox which sometimes gets up to 500 when downloading a game. I guess if you have a big family and a lot of things are downloading or streaming at once, but are people really hitting a limit. Even Netflix’s recommendations are super low. It just seems like we have some pushes for these crazy speeds(maybe for marketing or increments) when the reality is the speeds to you will never utilize it. I feel like I am missing something for how you could possibly justify this in your home.

ianburrell 2y ago
I think it makes sense for offices where there are more people doing more things. It is expensive to use more than 1Gbps. Need router that can do 2.5GBps or 10GBps. For business have separate access points, need switches and APs that can do 2.5Gbps.
- nerdjon 2y ago
  That I agree with, I guess I kinda always figured that businesses could already get internet at higher speed / bandwidth. Otherwise many offices would be abysmal.
pokstad 2y ago
The use cases might lag behind the infra. All the services we use today are designed around the constraint of lopsided upload/download bandwidth on broadband. If you build it, it will come.
- nerdjon 2y ago
  I get what you are saying, but Fios launched their 1gb internet in 2017 and it feels like most services have been stuck at their specific speed since then. I was curious, so I just went to download the Windows 11 ISO from Microsoft. That is capping out at about 70 mbps. Downloading an almost 7gb file in 2 minutes. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying "oh we don't need this speed". But clearly things have not been changing. We have been past my current download speed from Microsoft being a minimum for a while.

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