Switch to Frontier Fiber Optic? | Edhat

I left Santa Barbara years ago (back in the days of the much despised Verizon). Therefore my comments are general. Here goes: 1) ten years later, I still cringe when I see the letters c-o-x in print, 2) living in a small town (pop=4000) in the rural south in a rental house we had no less than ten internet provider options to choose from starting at $9.99 a month with no starting costs and no commitments to stay connected more than a month at a time (we got a break because we still had our old cox modem that we purchased to avoid three of their monthly fees), 3) we now live in the middle of a national forest which limits our options a lot. We can get satellite from either of two companies at $200 to $500 a month for service that isn’t reliable in bad weather but can be quite fast in good weather, “legacy” dsl at a hundred bucks a month for 15 to 30 MPS (I loved the fact that the little family business advertises their slowest speed in print rather than their fastest speed). We can get a rural cellular data plan at anywhere from $100 a month for 3G to $250 a month for 4G but that might require a special hot spot and a mast of up to 80 feet (no building department here but it’s still expensive to put in a tower). We just had T-Mo start offering 5G cellular at $40 per month. The service is pure bait and switch scam but the $40 per month all inclusive is real even if the advertised 500mb is optimistic by a factor of ten to twenty. In short, none of these companies act in a way that would make their mother proud except the one where mom actually comes in weekly and audits the books. Note that our electric coop provides a very slow connection (less than 2mb) to our remote read meter and is willing and is eager to run that to area homes as a three dollar a month option but is blocked by federal regulations from doing so.

That said, in any location you should pay almost no attention to the advertised speed. You should mainly be considering the guaranteed lowest speed and be sure to get it in writing. Ditto for cost. Cox could inflate their monthly bill by over 60% with a variety of unadvertised fees.

Good luck.