sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Telecom Service & Providers Frontier..........or is it Failtier?

A little story about everyone's favorite local telco, Frontier!

A small town currently has a fiber infrastructure linking all of the city buildings together. Unfortunately, they have no IT staff and the person who set it up has absolutely no subnets, everything is one big giant 16 bit netmask mess!

Let's fast forward to the Failtier...
The city is sold a bill of goods by the telco for a Mitel IP system with one little problem, the police department has their own infrastructure and is not connected to the city. They do tunnel through the city's fiber to the dispatch station, but that is the extent.

One evening, we are down there working on the PD's Toughbooks when dispatch calls and says their network connection is down. Sure enough, the VPN appliance shows the link down. After a few power cycles of the PD's equipment, it turns out Frontier powered on their equipment.

The one Frontier tech who was actually plugging in the Mitel IP equipment gave me a blank stare when I asked what IPs the equipment was on. The second tech told me exactly this, "We didn't know what the IPs were so we just guessed some numbers".

Great job taking down an entire city's police department for two hours by creating a broadcast storm that could only rival Hurricane Sandy!!

How or who in the freaking world training/not training these installers??

And that is my rant for the day

WOW! We have there service over here.

Frontier was originally the former Baby Bell 'Rochester (NY) Telephone', but they also became a CLEC and changed their name to Frontier. With that said, they still operate properly as the LEC in Rochester, but now they are gobbling up dozens of pieces of other LEC markets throughout the country. They've taken over chunks of Verizon's markets in nearly every state, some former Bell areas and plenty of independent ones. This makes for one big company with a whole bunch of different ways of doing things. Frankly, I don't know how they do it.

Then again, it doesn't sound as if it is going too well after all.

The Frontier CLEC/IXC from several years ago (which included Rochester Telephone) bought out the company I started with (Allnet Communication Services). Frontier was later bought out by Global Crossing which....in turn....was bought out by Level(3).

The current Frontier Communications started out as Citizens Telephone. It purchased the Frontier name from Global Crossing back in the early 2000s.

Both of the Frontier customers we serve are previous Verizon (OH and WV).

Having not dealt with the Ohio guys much, I can give a definitive answer that the West Virginia guys are 110% clueless. Had one customer that had more downtime in two weeks on their PRI than uptime. Each time out, they claimed to "fix" the problem by moving it to different pairs. Only after threatening the CLEC that we were going to move every customer that we possibly could to another provider did they put their chronic circuits team on the case.