It's perfectly reasonable to see "up to 100 Mbps" (for example) and expect speeds on average approaching that value, not 50 or 10 or even 60 or 70 most of the time.
At best it's misleading. Frontier should adjust the contract and marketing language to reflect its true capabilities. If it can deliver "up to 100 Mbps", but on average/typically can only deliver 50 Mbps, the marketing language and contract should reflect that, e.g., "50 Mbps on average/typically, with bursts up to 100 Mbps possible."
My understanding is that frontier serves mostly rural customers using the POTS infrastructure. They were advertising internet speeds that they were never capable of delivering.
This is indeed correct. While I understand the predicament of being far from the switch reduces speeds, it’s a bit absurd when you’re paying for 12, but can only get 3. (This is not an exaggeration.)
You’re are lucky to even get 3 if you pay for 12. In my (small) hometown most people have frontier so I definitely gathered a little more an anecdotal evidence when working on people’s networks/PCs and it was usually in the kilobytes 1-3 mbps on a good day (usually the lower end.)
At least in my area, most DSL providers derate their offerings based on distance from the DSLAM, so they're transparent about this... e.g. punch addresses in a small town into the CenturyLink website and you will see the offering decay from 15mbps to 3mbps as you get further from the phone exchange. I'm surprised that Frontier wasn't doing the same, or perhaps they were but being far too optimistic in their estimate.
Frontier also serves a bunch of reasonably large cities (for example territory they purchased from AT&T later in life). Where I live, I can get Frontier's "up to 24Mbit/s" service (probably closer to 10 if I'm lucky) or the competitor (cable company) which offers both traditional cable AND a new FiOS service with speeds up to 1 Gigabit. I haven't upgraded yet, and am still on 200 down/35 up but pay a fraction of what Frontier would charge (and I usually get closer to 215 down and 36 up). It's no wonder Frontier declared bankruptcy.
I live at about the maximum ADSL range from my central office and for years suffered with service that was slow and unreliable no matter what.
They put a fiber node just out of VDSL range but I have ADSL with two lines at 18 Mbps/s with an application-level load balancer. Each of those lines performs as rated almost all the time.
In the early 0's Frontier struggled with "middle mile" capacity even for customers who only got 1 Mbps DSL. People would have their service turned off with no explanation in my neighborhood, I had gone all the way up the CEO of the company to get help with one of my lines, the truck was followed by some lady in a car who was desperate to get hers fixed. Even when it worked the 1 Mbps DSL like would give more like 30k.
Eventually they fixed it, but around that time they announced they would implement a miniscule 10 GB monthly data cap which they were forced to suspend indefinitely once the public heard about it.
(I understand that upgrading DSL is a challenge, but there is no excuse for not upgrading the middle mile.)
At best it's misleading. Frontier should adjust the contract and marketing language to reflect its true capabilities. If it can deliver "up to 100 Mbps", but on average/typically can only deliver 50 Mbps, the marketing language and contract should reflect that, e.g., "50 Mbps on average/typically, with bursts up to 100 Mbps possible."