Frontier Fiber Internet

Lars Poulsen - 2025-02-01

Frontier Fiber Internet (In-progress)

For the last several years, I have struggled with getting an internet connection that delivers the features I need at a reasonable price. Recently, we are finally seeing some competition, and the options have gotten much better.

I decided to take advantage of this to greatly upgrade my service. The experience has been painful, but it is almost complete now.

** "Normal" Internet services Most home Internet installations are very simple. You buy them from a local telephone company or Cable TV company; in most areas there is exactly one of each, and if you need enough bandwidth (line speed) to be able to watch movies in HD, only the Cable company can provide it.

They typically contain

An access line (DSL, Cable-TV or DSL)
A modem. For a DSL line, the phone company provides it. For Cable, you can buy it or pay rent to the cable company. For Fiber, it is provided by the company.
A router (with Network Address Translation)
A Wi-Fi access point (often built into the router box)

For a residential service, you will get a random IP address every time the link is reset. This prevents you from running servers that can be accessed by others through you connetion. There may also be other technical means blocking such services.

If you need any such features, you will pay quite a bit extra for "business service".

My "special" needs

In my case, I need to run some servers on my Linux system at home.

1) I want to be able to access my photo albums (about 100,000 images) from the outside - That means a webserver with half a terabyte of storage

2) I want to be able to access my music library (10,000 tracks) from the outside - that's another 100 GB of storage

3) I want to be able to run a mail server, so I can provide a mailing list to my church congregation.

My past solutions

Over the years, as my needs have grown, I have moved services a few times.

In the pre-video days, my connection was DSL. I contracted it from a local ISP, who in turn procured the circuit to my house from the local phone company, in order to get the extra features.
When video streaming became a must-have, I got a business grade service from Cox Cable. The price started out reasonable (about USD 100/month, including TV channels) but the starting price was a promotional discounted rate, and within a year, the price started to go up and up.
When I got tired of the ever-escalating prices, I went back to the local ISP, who rented a faster circuit from Frontier Telephone Co. This was 4 SDSL circuits joined into one ethernet bridge, giving me 15 Mbps up and 15 Mbps down. Enough for Netflix and Amazon video. I have combined this with different "Cable TV over Internet" packages. This cost me $125/month for the Internet plus about $85/month for the "cable" programming package. At first "Hulu plus Live TV", later replaced with "Youtube TV".

But after I had a chance to try a 200 Mbps down, 100 Mbps up package from the cable company, I decided I like the much "snappier" service for interactive services, so I started looking for updated options.

I had hoped my ISP could continue as my intermediary, but they have been phasing out "classic" "retail" Internet services for a while, so if I needed any changes, I would have to look elsewhere.

What's new in the market?

The technical developments that have opened up the market are:

Everyone needs video, so DSL is no longer a viable product.
Cellphone technology has evolved to provide much more bandwidth, so mobile phone companies are slowly beginning to offer fixed wireless inernet to the home.
The cable companies have "fiber to the neighborhood", offering 200 Mbps connections at very reasonable prices (with the above limitations). Residential 200/200 costs about $90/month.
In response, Frontier Telephone (which replaced Verizon, which replaced GTE in this area) are rolling out "fiber to the home", and they recently reached my area. In order to "buy market share" they are offering greatly reduced prices. Residential 500/500 for $40/month. They offered me "business" service for $50/month plus a static IP for an additional $15/month. So compared to my service of the last 3 years, it is 10x the bandwith at half the cost. What's not to like?

My new service

I signed up for "Frontier Business Fiber Internet 500" with the static IP add-on. They confirmed it was available in my neighborhood, and scheduled an installation date.

My tribulations

The first problem was that while there was a fiber splitter box in the neighborhood, it was one or two telephone poles away. In our neighborhood, electricity, telephone lines and TV cables are all strung on wooded poles in the backyards of the homes. The salespeople and the tech support people are far away, and they would not let me talk to the people in town that do the installation work. This created some uncertainty, but in the end they gave me a new installation day one week after the original date. With a 4-hour installation window.

The installer actually showed up on the re-scheduled installtion date, just 15 minutes into the 8-12 time window. It turned out, that when they brought the fiber to the property, they had actually pulled it to my roof near where the phone lines land, so they really were ready to pull the fiber cable into my wiring closet (at the bottom of a hallway linen closet in the very center of the house). We had discussed whether to route the cable through the crawlspace under the house, or to go through the shallow attic space under the roof. In the end, we agreed that it was better to go through the attic space, and once he drilled a hole under the eaves and puthed the cable end it, he was so deft with his telescoping "fish hook pole" that he never needed to get up into the attic space. Great kudos for good (and clean) work.

He put the fiber modem box in the designated space, and put an all-in-one router-and-WiFi device next to it. With the assistance of a back-end tech support on his cellphone, he got the router configured and declared the installation complete a few minutes before noon. I wrote down the installation details:

my static IP address
the associated next-hop router IP address
the netmask
The WiFi SSIDs and passwords
The router login and password

... and then I left to go to my day job.

The next day was Saturday, and I started to explore getting my services rearranged so that my live systems could start using the new connection. There had been some uncertainty of whether I needed to keep the Frontier provided router connected, or whether I could just set my existing router to match the assigned IP address, mask and gateway. I figured that the latter was the most reasonable. But the link did not come up.

When it did not work, I started to experiment. The first and most obvious was to plug my laptop into the router. The network side of the router was NOT set up for a static IP address; it was doing DHCP and getting an entirely different IP address. And when I changed that so that it matched the IP address I had been told, it would not connect to the network.

I called Frontier tech support, only to learn that even for business customers, tech support hours were limited to Monday through Friday from 8 AM to 8 PM Eastern Time.

When I called tech support, it turned out to be very nearly impossible to talk to a tech support person. When I did find someone, they said they needed me to have a 4-digit PIN, which "you can find on your billing statement". Of course, I did not have a billing statement, and would not have one until a month later. But they said I could get one from "Account Servicing", which apparently means the billing office. However, the billing office could not (or would not) give me a 4-digit PIN, but they did vouch for me to the tech support person. The also gave me a "10-digit account number", which appears to be a BTN or Billing Telephone Number - a phantom phone number.

This tech support person agreed that I did not need to use the provided router. "That would be absurd, because most business customers have infrastructure that they need to be able to connect". Since it did not work, she gave me a different set of static address numbers (IP/mask/gateway). And when that did not work, she told me that they would need to send another field installer to my house. By then it was Tuesday, and the house call was scheduled for Saturday.

Over several following calls, the only progress I made was that the house call was moved up from Saturday to Friday. But the window was expanded to be all day (from 8 to 5).

The tech eventually came Friday just after 1 PM. He was able to talk to a more competent back-end technician, who explained how their version of static IP works, and why that means that you actually MUST use their router in front of your own router. But my attempts to reconfigure it had somehow messed it up, so they exchanged the router for a fresh one, and then it was working.

Of course I now have to reconfigure a lot of my systems, before it REALLY works.

change my DNS to show my new IP address
change my SPF mail authentication records in DNS
Set the new IP address on the edge router and turn off the old link
Verify that I can send and recieve email
Verify that IMAP access to my mail server works from inside and outside
Verify that my mailing list software can send to gmail, yahoo, aol etc

What I wish I had known

The Frontier version of static IP

As mentioned above, the static IP address is not achieved in the usual manner, by setting the IP address on the WAN side of the edge router and plugging that into the ethernet port on the modem. Or even by telling the DHCP server on the WAN network side that this router's MAC address should always be told to assume the IP address assigned to the customer.

Instead, the Sagemcom router provided by Frontier connects to the Frontier network with dynamic (DHCP) address assignment. But it has two different subnets to be configured on the customer side:

One is the usual subnet, which they have by default set up to be 192.168.254.254/24 with the router being at the high end (192.168.254.254). They call this "the private subnet".
The other one is "the public subnet". This is a different address range that coexists on the same ethernet. In my case, this is a 30-bit subnet (network mask 255.255.255.252), x.y.z.196 to x.y.z.199. On this subnet, my router is x.y.z.197 and the Frontier provided router is x.y.z.198. This address range is then projected into Frontier's routing network by some undocumented VPN-like mechanism.

This is not as crazy as it might seem at first. For one thing, if they know it is always there, they probably have a backdoor into its configuration command set, so they can check the configuration (so long as the customer has not changed it away from the default dynamic DHCP setup).

And they don't have to change their routing and DHCP configuration if they swap the router out.

I really think they need to write up a page or two describing this to customer IT folks like me. And maybe let their telephone support people know that some (but not all) of their fiber regions are set up to work like this.

Speed matters: You may actually want to use their router instead of your old one

All my equipment has 10/100 Mbps ethernet ports, including my edge router. So if I go through that edge router, I am limited to 100Mbps aggregate speed, while I have a service contract that gives me 5 times that bandwidth. So I bought a new ethernet switch with 8 ports of 1 GBps (i.e. 10/100/1000 Mbps). And I am seriously thinking of buying a new mini-PC (protectly 4GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 2 GigaBps ethernet ports) to be a Linux edge router.

You may want to use their router the way they intended it

Now that (I think) I know how the static IP works, I might just change the Private subnet range to 192.168.1.x/24 and ONLY let the Linux box use the static (public) IP. I.e., I would scrap my existing edge router. I could leave the Linux server's "normal" ïnside" address at 192.168.1.2 and push the public address as a secondary address on the same ethernet port. I would still want to let the Linux box do the DHCP address assignments, and I would want to set my own login passwords both on the router configuration and the WiFi. But this should work. And while the router's location is not the best location for a WiFi access point, it will probably still give adequate service (except possibly in the detached garage) and be a lot faster for some locations. And if not, I can just keep my old WiFi access point an extender in place for the benefit of the garage.

If this works, I don't really need to buy a new faster edge router.

And maybe I will do this at work, too!

At work, we have a slow (maybe 20 Mbps) ethernet drop into the ISP datacenter in our building. But this Frontier setup is only half what we pay for that connection. And it should work in the same way!

Update 2025-06-05

Frontier does not offer fiber access at our office location. Too bad.

We have had two outages. In both cases, I have been apalled at the poor customer service: Even though this is officially a "business service", technical support and outage reporting is only available on weekdays during "office hours (8 AM to 8 PM Eastern Time, or 5AM to 5PM Pacific time). They do not answer the phone, but you have to use their mobile phone app to get to "chat" with a robotic fake person, who first asks you to reboot the modem and the router, then offers to connect your chat session to a live person ... which takes anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes to get conected, and then it is often just someone following a script. From that point, it is often another hour before someone knowledgeable can fix a configuration error in their equipment ... or order a truck roll for a technician to come out and call the advanced tech support available to field techs, but not to most phone support reps.

When it works, it is amazing. And both times it failed, it was poor craftmanship by Frontier tech staff. The first time, our fiber was left unplugged at the neighborhood fiber splitter cabinet when they installed service for someone else. I found this at 5:30 PM on a Friday afternoon, and it was down until mid-morning Monday. The second time, they had buggered up the routing for my static IP after they had performed "a work order on my service, looks like something speed related". Except I had not asked for any service. I found this when I got up at 6AM, and it took until 10AM to get "advanced support" to look at what they had messed up.

But it is remarkably inexpensive for the bandwidth.

(End of page)