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Escambia County Gets Involved After Numerous Frontier Phone, Internet Outages
October 14, 2011
Frontier Communications — which provides landline telephone and internet service in Walnut Hill, Bratt, Molino and Atmore — has experienced several outages this year. That has prompted Escambia County officials to question the company and file complaints, while prompting the company to make some improvements and additional promises.
The first major outage of the year was March 22-23, with Frontier customers unable to call outside their exchange, including a loss of 911 service. The company provided no explanation for the outage which they termed “toll isolation”.
A five-hour outage occurred June 24, leaving Walnut and Molino Frontier customers unable to call outside their exchange and unable to reach 911. The cause of that outage, according to Frontier, was a fiber optic equipment failure in Walnut Hill or Molino.
During the 911 outages, Escambia County has responded by staffing the Walnut Hill and Molino fire stations with paid and volunteer personnel and made announcements through the media that persons with emergencies could go directly to a fire station for help if they did not have an available cellular phone.
Following the June 24 Frontier failure that isolated North Escambia Frontier customers from 911, Escambia County Administrator Randy Oliver sent a letter to Rhonda Lutzke, a senior vice president at Frontier, asking how the company would address the problem.
“This loss is a major concern and one which negatively impacts the ability of our citizens to have immediate access to assistance during an emergency,” Oliver wrote in his letter to Frontier. “Our county is committed to providing this service, including a professionally staffed state-of-the-art Public Safety Answering Point, and it is hoped that Frontier is as equally committed.
“I am requesting any information you can provide attesting that the causes of these outages are being addressed,” Oliver concluded.
In late September, Oliver (pictured) wrote complaint letters to the Florida Public Service Commission. He received a reply from Steven J. Stolting, Public Service Commission inspector general, stating that the PSC had no authority to investigate. The Florida Legislature stripped the Public Service Commission’s regulatory authority of most telephone company functions as of July 1.
“I have shared your letter with our managers responsible for resolving complaints directed to the Commission and for our regulatory activities over the telecommunications industry,” the PSC inspector general wrote.
“We understand your concerns with the interruption of 9-1-1 service,” Daniel M. Hoppe, PSC director, stated in a written reply to Oliver on October 7. Hoppe said Frontier told the Commission that an alternative AT&T fiber route had been installed to provide a second route to Escambia County’s 911 call center.
According to Karen Miller, a spokesperson for Frontier, the New York headquartered company has since installed a second fiber optic route to virtually eliminate the telephone line outages and ensure Frontier customers can reach 911 in Escambia County.
Frontier has also been plagued by numerous area-wide outages for their high speed DSL and dialup internet customers — the most a recent a six-hour internet outage this past Monday. Some outages have lasted as much as 12 hours.
The company has said most of the outages were not their fault, blaming the downtime on AT&T, which provides Frontier’s internet connections. Two of the outages — September 1 and October 3 — were blamed on construction crews cutting an AT&T fiber optic cable between Atmore and Bay Minette.
All of the Walnut Hill, Bratt, Molino and Atmore DSL and dialup services provided by Frontier are connected to the rest of the internet by a single fiber optic line between Atmore and Atlanta. When that line goes down, there is currently no backup, Miller said.
But she said Frontier is working to install a second independent route to the internet from Atmore, preventing a single fiber cut from cutting the North Escambia and Atmore areas off from the internet. q
“We are close to finishing an engineering study to get a second route to get traffic from Atmore to Atlanta,” Miller said. “It won’t be that long before it happens.”
Once that second connection is installed, Miller said, it will provide a backup to keep internet traffic flowing from the area.
“Hopefully Frontier will see this as an indication that the county is serious about reliable telephone service for this area of the county,” Oliver said about his letters to the Public Service Commission and Frontier management.
Pictured top: Escambia County’s 911 dispatch center. Pictured bottom inset: Frontier’s Molino central office on Highway 29.
Comments
30 Responses to “Escambia County Gets Involved After Numerous Frontier Phone, Internet Outages”
mediacom is located behind the BK on trammel square in Atmore open tuesdsday and thursday from 8am to 4:30pm closed at (1pm to 2pm for lunch) and and my friend has mediacom and it is way faster compared to the very bad Frontier and mediacom should come in to the walnuthill and bratt area i think they will come to molino.
At a friends house & ONCE AGAIN SLOW INTERNET from frontier…….frontier sucks!!
@billy jim You are DEFINITELY not the only one complaining. I pay for max and like you get plagued with slow speeds. I emailed every single manager in the south east region and complained. Had a tech at my house the next morning and they changed my provisions.
I am still not satisfied with FRONTIER. I feel if there was another internet provider availble to us out here FRONTIER might get better and cheaper.
Sam,
sorry but you are wrong, at one time that was the situation but not anymore. In molino i no frontier is serving a buss thats in “att’s area” they were asked to put in lines there but didnt want the buss so frontier put in the lines,in another area att and frontier are on the same side of the rd. A person that lives there has a choice of frontier,att,or brighthouse cable. I have had experience with all of these companies and one just aint any better that the other. I will say this though i know people that work at all of these companies because of being in the buss and most of them are good people just trying to make a living doing the best they can with what they have to work with.. the problem is usally in uper management trying to save money..
just me: you are wrong. at&t or any other company cannot go into another companys area. frontier has i guess you call it a franchise. your fed government blocks at&t, verizon, etc from coming in. thats called a monopoly. if frontier did not want it, any other company could bid on it. if no one wanted it at&t or verizon could be forced to take it. at least that’s the way it used to be. we been obama’d so who knows what gives now.
It is obvious that Frontier is not popular here. Many people have ditched their land lines for wifi/cell phones. The only problem there is when hurricanes come in the cell phones/wifi don’t work. Not sure if there is a solution other than a competing phone company. Is that a possiblity?
I’m tired of them slowly lowering walnut hills speed . I was one first to get high speed DSL when it got here. They finally had us just over 1 meg but shy of the 1.5 it should be. we started off with down ld. 1100 and up load was 530 -560 and ping was good with 15 -45 mil sec. now we’ve been steady disconnected and takes forever to watch news video.but our speed have been dropped to upload speed of 160 from 265 and before that drop from near 560 upload speeds. Mow told get used to slow speeds . I race online and that speed keeps ping high and packets jam and I m forced to lower grafix in simulator just to be able to race with small numbers of racers on not so grafix intense track, so much for being able to use 3 screens and and all my extra gauges and 16000 RPM tach. Its just not right that we are near 10 % globally for DSL speeds. since Im online 12-18 hrs a day I notice all the fluxuation of speed right away and now i’ve been told im only one complaining and need to get used to what were given. grrrr.ITS NOT RIGHT, if there’s fiber optic lines to molino then you cant tell me there isnt enough room for everyone to have higher speed of our 1.5 mb and at least 550 range upload speeds. ty for letting me rant./ billy
all you people wanting att to come in. let me tell you att or anyone else can come in this area any time they want, its not regulated anymore. but they want ,why? because we are in a rual area and the money it takes to run it just isnt there.mcdavid area has had att forever and gues what they still DO NOT have any highspeed internet avalable to them. i know pople in the area who have asked frontier to take over that area because with all the proplems they may have frontier atleast will put dsl out in every back rd. they have. By the way the last 2 times frontiers internet was down it was because att let thier fiber get cut by a road crew.That was true , not an excuse ,true frontier should have a loop for a back up but as with every buss it s all about money, i understand that is now being spent so sometime in the near future that problem will be fixed.I got alittle mad to when it went out but really people is face book that important? i see my neighbor just half mile up the rd with att and dial -up and i say i will take an outage here and there.
@Stacey, you are right it is crazy, and @huh is right too-our public service commission is useless and we have let it happen, by not protesting it enough. @JayW you are right deregulation should never have happened-and there are plans to deregulate other public utilties as well, i.e. your electricity provider. It would probably take an act of congress, literally, to to actually get us a true choice of carriers. And we all know how well that works! The link to the LEC map is below.
Click here.
HOW ABOUT DROPPING FRONTIER IN WALNUT HILL, BRATT, AND MOLINO AND LETTING AT&T OR BELL SOUTH COME IN. IF WE DONT USE FRONTIER WHAT OTHER CHOICE DO WE HAVE. IS VERISON AVAILABLE OUT HERE? ALLOW US TO CHOSE OUR INTERNET PROVIDER. I GREE FRONTIER IS TOO EXPENSIVE AND THEIR SERVICE SUCKS
the shocking part of the story
“The Florida Legislature stripped the Public Service Commission’s regulatory authority of most telephone company functions as of July 1.”
Why on earth would Florida take power away from commissions that are supposed to regulate this stuff? If they can’t regulate it , then whats the point of having them? Everyone should complain further to the FCC.
Frontier owns the lines and equipment and sadly you have no other choices because of that for DSL services, it will run through the same frontier owned lines
I do not see a link to any map in the article. So what choices do we in Davisville, Bratt, and Walnut Hill have for internet service? We can use cell phones, but for internet there are no choices that I am aware of. Thanks old phone rep…as a former phone rep myself I know you are speaking the truth.
@Stacy if your wireless drops out all the time, you can change the Channel to 1 or 12. All retail wireless device’s ship with channel 6. So with you and everybody else on channel 6, things tend to get crowded.
@gage sounds like a bad phone wire. Go to home depot or lowes or hit a buddy up for some data cable. Like Cat5 wire. pick a pair of wires, most use the blue/blue white pair. One end to the demark box, the box on the side of the house from he telephone company. The other end to the jack by your modem/router. don’t worry about polarity as home phones are analog, so it really don’t mater. Just remember, when troubleshooting, change one thing at a time and test. But, that sounds like a bad wire, or bad filters. Good luck.
Now that they are being watched and monitored lets see how often it happens now.
@Old Phone Rep, I appreciate your sentiment but you are not entirely correct. It’s true that in the early days of local phone competition many alternative providers just repackaged the service being offered by the incumbent telco. However, that is not true in the case of the cable providers (Brighthouse, Cox, Mediacom, Time Warner, etc.)
If you are fortunate enough to live in an area served by Brighthouse then you absolutely have a choice for phone service. Brighthouse uses voice over IP technology to deliver telephone service across its own network, not Frontier’s. The only connection between the 2 companies takes place when a Frontier customer calls a Brighthouse customer or vice versa. Frontier plays no part in providing phone service to Brighthouse telephone customers.
I have been in the cable voice industry for a very long time and I spend every working day making sure my company’s network (not Brighthouse) is designed and operating correctly. Frontier has nothing to do with phone service from Brighthouse.
That’s just crazy, and yes you answered my question, but it still doesn’t make sense. I think we should have the right to “choose” who we want our carrier to be. Can you imagine if we HAD to all have Dish Network or DIrectv, or all HAD to have Mediacom? It’s crazy!
Old Phone Rep, you know what your talking about. However in the Molinio area Brighthouse is bundling services and keeping the same phone number at lower price for a year. (Like you said you’re just pay a different company) I myself pay a little more, but I don’t bundle my services because I don’t want to loose everything when the phone line goes down.
I hope everyone has a great weekend, and a big Roll Tide Roll!!!!
@Stacey, you can’t have another local carrier because you are not in BellSouth Territory. “Choice” of local carriers only applies to those in areas served by large Local Exchange Carriers (LECS). Because we are a rural area, we are served by a smaller LEC, and do not have a choice for local service. All this was agreed to back in the 80’s when deregulation of Ma Bell and AT&T happened, however we were never part of the Bell System, so the rules for our area are different. Furthermore, the “choice” of local service is really an illusion-they all rent their cable from whoever the incumbent local exchange service is—so there is really no difference in service, other than to whom you are paying your bill. See the link to the map above.
One of the biggest mistakes that was ever been made in the United States was the breaking up of the Bell System by the Federal Trade Commission. The US had the best communication system in the World. Look at what we have now!
Even though Mr. Haney in “Hooterville” had to climb up a phone pole to make a phone call, it always worked.
Had I known that the only utilities available in the North Escambia area was Frontier and Escambia River Electric Authority I probably would have looked elsewhere to buy land and build a house. The internet goes down every time it rains and sometimes on a sunny day. It can lightning in Jay and we lose power in Walnut Hill.
Maybe Gulf Power / The Southern Company and the Bell System should buy these hicks out and provide us with good service
@gage, I used to have that problem, but they changed my channel on my the system and haven’t had that problem since! Other than the ridiculous outages!
Can anyone answer WHY we can’t get AT&T in the Bratt area? If I am not mistaken, the Mc David area can get them…they have high speed DSL for $19.99 a month…Frontier is ridiculously high and the service is terrible. Why aren’t there more options in our area?
Has anyone else had trouble with frequent disconnects. Sometimes the internet will disconnect several times in an hour. Unplugging the router for 15 seconds usually fixes the problem but it is so time consuming when you are streaming a movie in from netflix. Frontier has changed the router out 3 times but no difference. I have called frontier and talked with the tech support and also have talked with the service tech but no one has an idea why I am having so many disconnects. I have a desktop, 2 laptops, and an xbox. The desktop has xp professional, laptops has vista and each one has the same amount of trouble with disconnects. So I know it is not a hardware or software problem. Some days it is so bad you don’t want to even sign on to the internet. Yesterday was one of those days, but today it has not disconnected one time. I don’t understand why this is happening and why no one can tell me why it is happening.
Some good advice folks
Last week I called Frontier and told them that I was going to “drop” them, and have my service cut off, so they connected me to another person (sweet talker) and that person gave me credit for phone AND internet for a month if I would keep service!
another person I know, did the same thing and got credit too, sooooo it give it a try!
Get used to it,folks.
“In late September, Oliver (pictured) wrote complaint letters to the Florida Public Service Commission. He received a reply from Steven J. Stolting, Public Service Commission inspector general, stating that the PSC had no authority to investigate. The Florida Legislature stripped the Public Service Commission’s regulatory authority of most telephone company functions as of July 1.”
Sounds like we have some legislators with holdings in the telecommunications industry.
They had a secondary route interconnected in Pensacola with Verizon (old MCI), but abandon the cable a couple of years ago. Now to my knowledge they are interconnected with AT&T in the Atmore area. Some of you may not know, but years ago then Southland Telephone was own by MCI, but with all the dealing going on for years it was finally sold. Now if it had stayed with MCI it would have been sold to who? You got it Frontier Communication!! Frontier has bought a lot of small telephone companies making them one of the largest TELEPHONE companies in the country.
I am pretty much done with Frontier. I’ll be moving everything to Verizon. If they fail me, I’ll look for someone else.
Voting with my money and my ‘feet.’
Frontier still does NOT get it…placing blame is a child’s game…they are getting paid good money to deliver internet to Atmore and the surrounding area…stop blaming others and FIX the problem.
I would say the same to Frontier’s customers…if you need the internet to provide your own services, then don’t blame Frontier. LEAVE Frontier and go with another ISP…I am now with Verizon MiFi and it is great…FAST and RELIABLE!
Perhaps they will investigate how Frontier can charge us both Alabama and Florida sales tax and Escambia County sales and franchise tax.
Ha! Frontier has installed a second fiber route? Is that supposed to be a joke? Frontier leases lines from us (at&t) so I would like to know where this new secondary fiber route is… In my opinion the county stepping in and becoming involved somewhat is a very good thing. Perhaps now with Frontier having the light shining on them they will finally make the necessary upgrades in this area that should have been installed about 5 years ago and bring up data speeds for “their” DSL to equal of what the rest of the world has! Not to mention possibly backing off the number of supporters for the class action lawsuit against them for failing to meet federal requirements… Who knows…