Big Company Bues Conclusion?

Jeff Lee, LittleT Broadband

A crew just left my property after completing the burial of the 400’ fiber cable running across the field (and the fiber still works!), which means this rant can finally come to a close. The guys burying the cable were great and completed the work in a little over an hour, not bad for that length and the obstacles around which they had to work.

Frontier customer support was absolutely worthless in getting my issue resolved. It seems they are completely decoupled from the subcontractor that buries the cables and have no way to track or follow up on this process. In my opinion this is a broken system that needs to be corrected.

What actually made it happen was a Frontier technician that I met last week who was installing fiber for a neighbor. I explained the situation to him, he took down my contact information, and then put me in direct touch with the folks at Appalacian Telephone, the subcontractor handling all cable burial for Frontier. I guess we will blame the delay on communication as there was no contact from Frontier or the subcontractor that they were attempting to get this done. Like many of you, I receive multiple spam phone calls every day and so have my phone forward unknown calls to voicemail. If a technician from a burial crew attempted to contact me to coordinate, no voicemails were ever left even though I gave Frontier support explicit instructions about contacting me. My case paperwork had been filed as unable to contact, though I never received a voicemail, text, email, etc. Yeah, defintely a broken system.

Oh well, thankfully it is done now.

If you are having difficulty getting new fiber buried, know that Frontier customer support is unlikely to help you. Chalk this up to poor management and organization on Frontier’s part and possibly workload due to the large number of installs taking place at this time. My personal experience to date with Frontier technicians has been great, and the tech who helped me with this said they are running about a week out on installs. The lead tech with the burial crew indicated about a 2 week lag. But take this infomation loosely as your mileage may vary.