Intentionally muddying the line between core and last-mile fiber is a misleading tactic many ISPs use to confuse consumers into thinking DSL or cable are as robust as fiber to the home (tip: they aren’t). But while these ads are misleading, very rarely does a company intentionally lie about running fiber to the home nationally when they don’t. As we noted yesterday, Frontier CEO Maggie Wilderotter this week told The Oregonian the company “deploys fiber to the home all across the country,” a claim that’s stretching the truth. Frontier tried to clarify in a follow up statement to the paper:We do offer Fiber-to-the-Home or premise in cases of businesses in a number of our communities. Prior to the acquisition close we had about 10,000 locations with FTTH capabilities in the 8 West Region states we serve. We offer high speed internet and voice services over the network under our Frontier brand name. In all our new neighborhood development projects (green field locations) we build with FTTH capabilities.Our mistake: we were wrong yesterday in saying they offer FTTH nowhere. They actually do offer it to a scattered number of small businesses. Still, scattered greenfield deployments “in cases of businesses” isn’t the same thing as claiming you’re deploying fiber to the home “all across the country,” and Frontier has been very busy in recent weeks trying to downplay the reality that the fastest speed available to the majority of Frontier customers is a paltry 1.5-3 Mbps.
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