Editor;
I love living in the mountains of West Virginia in Pocahontas County. One element I do find frustrating is that most of us have no option but to rely on Frontier for landline phone and internet service, since many of us cannot get a cell phone signal at our homes.
Frontier has a reputation for terrible third world service with unreliable phone and glacially slow internet speeds when it works.
The local technicians are great folks, the problem lies with the company being unwilling to invest in the local infrastructure and in many cases having a grossly dysfunctional management structure. I suspect that some work orders I call in never get to the local technicians.
So, what do you do if your phone is not working, and Frontier fails to respond in a timely fashion.
The answer is the West Virginia Public Service Commission. Your first step is to contact the Frontier Customer Service line at 1-800-376-6843; if after a reasonable period of time they fail to correct the issue than it is time to reach out to the Commission. You can do this on line at Complaints – Public Service Commission of West Virginia or by calling 1-800-642-8544. A technician from the Commission will then contact Frontier and a US-based Frontier representative will reach out to you and fix the issue.
The Commission unfortunately has no oversight for internet service.
I have had to use this approach on several occasions to address problems either I or neighbors had with Frontier. Something you need to be aware of, if you have a landline, it will still work for a period of time if the power goes out. In my area we found that this was only about 45 minutes. This was totally unacceptable and after working through the Commission, Frontier replaced the batteries for our hub and the system now works for several hours.
It is a pity that our states political leadership does not address this systemic issue in an effective manner.
Joe Kaffl
Hillsboro
