Frontier customer faces third week without internet connection
Jul. 22—A Lyme man has had it with Frontier's lack of communication.
Hank Tenney of Grassy Hill Road said Wednesday that Frontier Communications has yet to resolve an internet outage that began on July 1.
He told The Day he never expected a great — or even good — connection from his DSL service, which is slower than cable or fiber optic.
"But no connection for three weeks? And no apparent resolution? This is just not right," he said.
Tenney lives about a half-mile into the woods, where Frontier is the only available option, he said.
The company's corporate public relations representative acknowledged a series of questions emailed by The Day on Wednesday afternoon, but didn't answer any of them. A public relations representative from the company called later Wednesday and said the company is investigating reports of the outage.
Tenney, no stranger to internet service disruptions, said Frontier technicians have been dispatched to his address a half-dozen times so far this year. He said the technicians told him the problem involves a line to his house that the company refuses to replace.
He said he called the company, as he always does, to report the most recent outage: "And as I always tell them, after spending a half-hour going through the same process over and over again, 'It's not me. It's not my modem. It's from your line somewhere to mine,'" he said.
The issue hasn't been resolved, despite multiple calls over the past three weeks and repeated assurances by the company that a technician was working on it, according to Tenney.
He said a customer service representative at one point told him service had been restored when it had not been. "Meanwhile, I'm getting a text saying service is on, and then service is out again. It's really confusing," he said.
He called the company last week only to be told once again that a technician was on it.
"I'm sitting in the dark ages saying nobody seems to care that people — at least me, and I don't think I'm the only one — had been without it at that point for two weeks," he said.
Based on the service outages search function on the company's website, there were outages at least along Grassy Hill Road into Old Lyme, Blood Street in Lyme and several of their offshoots as of Wednesday afternoon.
Tenney, who described himself as "stuck" with Frontier for now, lamented the lack of options on his remote property. He said a neighbor had success with an established high-speed satellite internet company, but Tenney's location didn't work with the signal.
Instead, he's hanging his hopes on Elon Musk's massive constellation of satellites that promises to deliver high-speed internet anywhere in the world.
According to CNBC, Musk last month said SpaceX's satellite internet network Starlink expects to grow to a few hundred thousand users, possibly over 500,000, within 12 months.
"The first time I heard about that, I put my money down," Tenney said. "Between now and the end of the year, I'm supposed to be able to get something that will hopefully allow me to break free from this Frontier nightmare."
