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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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.