OPINION: Frontier isn’t ‘better’ than Suddenlink

Depending on where you live, the speeds and performance can be atrocious and hardly qualify as “broadband.” Most of this depends on your distance from the Central Office and/or the quality/age of your copper lines servicing your house. If these aren’t optimal, the limits for DSL speeds are not great. Then there is the oversaturation issue too. We went years being told a family member couldn’t sign up for Frontier because they were basically to capacity. Speed-wise, if you have 1-3 users in your household, then a Frontier DSL service will probably be OK for you. But the minute you try 2-way conferencing, photo/video uploading or similar, you will see the limitations. The most significant limitation? Upload speed. DSL just doesn’t do that well.

On the other hand, cable internet, such as what Suddenlink offers, has higher/faster throughput ceilings than DSL just because of the medium used (shielded coax) primarily. Assuming the “last mile” infrastructure (the cable from the head end to your house) is good, the potential for speed with cable blows DSL away. Now, the caveat is that you are sharing a path with potentially many others, as cable companies don’t pull a new coax run for every house. It is a “shared” topology.

With all that being said, none of this matters when it comes to upstream capacity (trunk or backbone) to the next POP (Point of Presence) and redundancy. For example, if Suddenlink and/or Frontier only have one path out of the Silver Valley, and if that path gets compromised (fiber cut, etc.) then the entire area loses connectivity. Ideally a provider has a “fiber ring” so that if one area gets cut or damaged the system “heals” itself and re-routes traffic. BTW, the Silver Valley has ZERO redundancy. Geographically, it is a very challenging area for metro style fiber networks. This is why the existing fiber and conduit (which isn’t “missing”) going down the dag nab middle of I-90 is so important yet frustrating.

Then, if you live way out in the sticks, which many do, because why wouldn’t you? We live in a beautiful area. But if you make this choice, your options are even more limited. Satellite internet. Yuck. Yeah it works… but the latency is bad (think round trip for the packets of data to travel), and the limits they place on data are highway robbery. If you can get DSL, Cable or Fixed Wireless, don’t even consider Satellite. This isn’t even close.

But I digress. Good internet in a rural area like this is going to take some big time creativity and disruption. I believe we are seeing that now. Actually “Thin Air” (RIP Wayne Maxwell) gave it a run over a decade ago but they were just too soon to the game. Air Pipe bought that infrastructure and still has a limited service in the Silver Valley. But now there is a new provider in the area. Actually, they have been in the area for a long time. They now offer residential and small business internet plans using high performance/grade fixed wireless. This is NOT cellular, and it isn’t “Wi-Fi” although it is similar. Think “long range reliable Wi-Fi,” if you must. Anyway, in addition to offering FASTER speeds both UP and DOWN, they will also offer a redundant path out of the Silver Valley. I.e. if fiber gets cut, they will most likely have the ability to switch to another “path” out of the Silver Valley. I won’t get too much into the weeds here but we’ve been working on an “outside the box” solution for the SV for a LONG time and I believe these guys can get it done. The down side? They are a small privately owned business, and they can only do so many installs per day. They also need line of sight to their newly configured wireless radio clusters. They are currently in Wallace and Kellogg. Of course they would love to expand, but this takes time and $$. If I had an extra few hundred grand I’d invest. Crap I’d buy my own relay to get their service up Montgomery Gulch.

I recently switched from Frontier to Suddenlink because of newer/faster speed plans. I can say from personal experience that Suddenlink does go down more frequently than Frontier, but my experience with Frontier was far from awesome and the speeds were abysmal. In fact, my Suddenlink has been down since Friday, but I’d still rather have it than Frontier. Yeah it really sucks to be down, but the potential for Suddenlink is much higher in my humble opinion. Also, I know and am friends with people who work for both Suddenlink and Frontier. I’m not blaming them, as they have little control over fiber paths and redundancy outside the SV, and flooding is serious stuff, but it still sucks. If I could convince my wife to move to ANYWHERE in line of sight to J&R Electronics, I’d do it yesterday. Because this is going to change the game.

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P.S. I’d still be bummed out over this Suddenlink outage, but if they had better communications, it would be easier to tolerate. I mean I logged into my “My Suddenlink” portal and in status it says “no known outages in your area.” What the actual heck?