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Matthew Lasar - May 27, 2010 1:23 am UTC
The rural phone company that made its mark by imposing a $249.99 data cap on broadband DSL customers in a small Minnesota town is no doubt happy this week. The Federal Communications Commission has given Frontier Wireless permission to buy 4.8 million lines from Verizon, mostly in rural and smaller-town areas around the country.
"This transaction—which includes significant deployment commitments from Frontier—will help advance the goals of the National Broadband Plan by bringing broadband to millions of consumers, small businesses, and anchor institutions in 14 states across the West, Midwest, and South," the FCC says. We're talking Arizona, California, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Washington, Wisconsin, and West Virginia here.
Frontier came to our attention when the telco inexplicably informed its broadband subscribers in Mound, Minnesota (pop. 9,435) that if their data usage rose beyond 100GB over a 30-day period, their monthly rate would go up to $99.99. And if their usage jumped to 250GB, the bill would increase to $249.99.
The normal Frontier rate is $49.99 a month for a DSL connection to streams "up to" 3Mbps. "A reasonable amount of usage is defined as 5GB combined upload and download consumption during the course of a 30-day billing period," the company adds.
We asked Frontier if the firm planned to export this data cap schedule from Mound to its soon-to-be-acquired properties. "Currently we have no intention of expanding it beyond that," we were told.
This Mound situation does not seem to have worried the FCC very much. The big picture for the Commission is a third of the lines that Frontier will buy currently provide no broadband at any speed, and only half offer a rate of at least 3Mbps.
So in exchange for this green light, Frontier must roll out at least 3Mbps broadband to at least 85 percent of its newly purchased lines by the last day of 2013, at least 4Mbps to the same percentage by the end of 2015, while guaranteeing actual speeds of at least 1Mbps for all new deployments.
On top of that, Frontier must launch an "anchor institution initiative," building out fiber to hospitals, libraries, and government buildings in its markets, "particularly in unserved and underserved communities." Here's hoping that none of them will get the Mound treatment.
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