Frontier Communications Fail

Companies merge all the time. It's almost the way of American business life. As a successful company you either rise high enough to buy out other companies or you get just big enough to attract the interest of your competitors, getting yourself bought out in the process. Many times both can occur.

One of the largest mergers this year is that of Frontier Communications who bought out Verizon FiOS. Unfortunately for those who had the cable television and internet service from FiOS, your plan took a giant dump on you.

Internet speeds cut in half, channels disappearing, the inability to access video-on-demand channels, and more, all the while charging customers equal or even higher prices than before the merger. It has even been common for them to acknowledge that they are overcharging and insist that you have to call them on a monthly basis to "adjust" the costs to where they should properly be.

Is this wrong? Of course.

What's the reason though? Could it be a disregard for their customers? At this point this appears to be a growing possibility as they have still yet to fix many of their problems. Could it be greed? Maybe...for every customer they overcharge, it only means more money in their bank account. Short term this might benefit them, but this discredits them as a company in the long term and causes the migration of their customers to competitors such as Time Warner.

Some customers have seen the wrong packages appear on their bills. Pre-merger they had 2 television package plans only to find that post-merger it shows they have 3 television plans. Where does Frontier believe these accounted for boxes came from? They don't have serial numbers for the third box. Yet, they are willing to argue that they are in fact the ones in the right.

Many people have spent money purchasing digital versions of movies from FiOS that they can access anytime they want. After the merger though, these purchases disappeared and even the free video-on-demand content such as missed television shows were no longer available. Just for the "free" content the average customer pays anywhere from $6 to $10 a month. It didn't matter that none of the FiOS customers could access this, Frontier still charged away knowing they were in the wrong. Their customer reps will tell you it's your responsibility to call in monthly to fix this. Why can't they charge correctly the first time around?

Even if you were willing to call in monthly or reach Frontier via their internet chat option, it takes forever to get help. On the phone, customers have complained that it has taken several hours of waiting just to finally talk to a rep and that's not taking in account if they are even able to fix your problem (or willing to).

Some mergers have bumpier roads than others, but the merger between Verizon FiOS and Frontier has been one giant nightmare. I myself was a customer of FiOS for 5 years...the key word is WAS as I will be switching to another cable and internet provider this very week.