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Frontier Demands $4,300 Cancellation Fee Despite Horribly Slow Internet (arstechnica.com)
Frontier Communications reportedly charged a cancellation fee of $4,302.17 to the operator of a one-person business in Wisconsin, even though she switched to a different Internet provider because Frontier's service was frequently unusable. From the report: Candace Lestina runs the Pardeeville Area Shopper, a weekly newspaper and family business that she took over when her mother retired. Before retiring, her mother had entered a three-year contract with Frontier to provide Internet service to the one-room office on North Main Street in Pardeeville. Six months into the contract, Candace Lestina decided to switch to the newly available Charter offering "for better service and a cheaper bill," according to a story yesterday by News 3 Now in Wisconsin. The Frontier Internet service "was dropping all the time," Lestina told the news station. This was a big problem for Lestina, who runs the paper on her own in Pardeeville, a town of about 2,000 people. "I actually am everything. I make the paper, I distribute the paper," she said. Because of Frontier's bad service, "I would have times where I need to send my paper -- I have very strict deadlines with my printer -- and my Internet's out."
Lestina figured she'd have to pay a cancellation fee when she switched to Charter's faster cable Internet but nothing near the $4,300 that Frontier later sent her a bill for, the News 3 Now report said. Charter offered to pay $500 toward the early termination penalty, but the fee is still so large that it could "put her out of business," the news report said. [...] Lestina said the early termination fee wasn't fully spelled out in her contract. "Nothing is ever described of what those cancellation fees actually are, which is that you will pay your entire bill for the rest of the contract," she said. Lestina said she pleaded her case to Frontier representatives, without success, even though Frontier had failed to provide a consistent Internet connection. "They did not really care that I was having such severe problems with the service. That does not bother them," she said. Instead of waiving or reducing the cancellation fee, Frontier threatened to send the matter to a collections agency, Lestina said.
Lestina figured she'd have to pay a cancellation fee when she switched to Charter's faster cable Internet but nothing near the $4,300 that Frontier later sent her a bill for, the News 3 Now report said. Charter offered to pay $500 toward the early termination penalty, but the fee is still so large that it could "put her out of business," the news report said. [...] Lestina said the early termination fee wasn't fully spelled out in her contract. "Nothing is ever described of what those cancellation fees actually are, which is that you will pay your entire bill for the rest of the contract," she said. Lestina said she pleaded her case to Frontier representatives, without success, even though Frontier had failed to provide a consistent Internet connection. "They did not really care that I was having such severe problems with the service. That does not bother them," she said. Instead of waiving or reducing the cancellation fee, Frontier threatened to send the matter to a collections agency, Lestina said.
That was the mistake. Never sign a contract for a service like that.
Basically, Frontier is letting their copper rot on the ground, but still charging everyone full freight.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Failure to deliver a useable service should render the contract null & void. Contracts must be equitable.. I get something (internet) and you get something (money).. They don't have to be fair, but they MUST be equitable.
They need every penny they can pinch whether they earned it or not.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Don't like it, don't sign it?
In many jurisdictions based on common law, this would be unenforceable on the basis that it is a "penalty clause"--a contractual clause seeking "damages" out of all proportion to any actual damages. This may be worth looking into.
There are plenty of no-contract services available, so there's no reason to ever consider a service that requires a contract.
IMO, the services that require contract are always a scam. Always.
(Hint: They're trying to lock you in, because they already know they're not going to live up to their end of the bargain.)
Sadly her mother naively signed the contract. The cancellation fee details are probably buried in legalese.
Get a couple TV stations to do a human interest story in their news. Really bad press.
File a complaint with whoever regulates the service.
Then call a lawyer, and sue for breach of contract, for failure to provide the contracted service.
Escalate, and escalate.
Make collecting that fee too expensive.
Time consuming, but burning an asshole can be satisfying.
I once got an ISP to wave the early termination penalty by threatening to force them to invoke the "misuse of services" cancellation. The contract was poorly written and only had an early termination penalty (in the amount of all payments due for the remainder of the multiyear contract) in the event that I cancelled, the only penalty for misuse was "immediate termination of services". Our own legal counsel agreed -- if they terminated our service, we didn't have to pay.
So I called my sales rep to cancel and he said we' d have to pay the early termination penalty. So I told him that we had a client who was ready to use the connection to send spam (which was one of the activities they prohibited), and of course the sales rep said that they'd have to terminate our service and we'd still have to pay the penalty. So I asked him to run it past his own legal department and get back to me - this ISP already had an issue with their customers sending spam.
They let us terminate early without penalty. I never did service with that vendor again, so I don't know if they updated their contracts. They are long gone now, having been acquired (and that company acquired too).
If everything requires an SLA or else you can't exercise your voting with your money then we ALL are screwed. Every business you'll ever deal with can get away with poor service, and the recourse is, sorry about your luck. You should have made me a better company by using the threat of the legal system against me. Lawyers will love it, you will not.
This flat out isn't true everywhere in the US, particularly in small towns.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
One cannot help but remember the South Park episode about cable TV.
I have my own tale of Frontier lack of interest in keeping a land line operational. Finally gave up and got a Tracfone. Then there was another battle to actually get the land line cancelled.
If the contract is in her mom's name it's probably not valid. Get a lawyer to write a nasty letter.
Most likely, the mother signed the 3 year contract because of a large discount (large compared to very expensive cummulative monthly fees).
Since this kind of contract generally stipulates that the full remaining amount must be paid when terminating the contract early, the daughter should have documented the problems, contracted a monthly Charter internet service, continued to document Frontier's failings for 1-2 more months, and gone to small claims court to settle the whole thing (probably without reimbursement of alternative service).
She cannot stop paying Frontier in the meantime because they will sell the "debt" to a debt collector.
Every time some idiot yammers about how the free hand of the market will correct things, remember stories like this. Without regulation, every company will put abusive contracts in place that will force you to pay a fortune to end a contract in order to make it as difficult as possible for you to be able to choose.
Contracts are a basic element of business whenever large transactions, transactions over time, or transactions on credit are involved. If contracts can be easily violated without penalty than all these types of business activity are endangered. No matter how sympathetic somebody's case seems when they plead it and you only hear their side of it, a market-based economy needs for contract law to apply reliably and consistently.
If this lady is indeed in business (and presumably would enforce any contracts against others if those others broke them) then she surely must have a basic grasp of the idea that you READ AND UNDERSTAND ANY CONTRACT BEFORE YOU SIGN IT. What would SHE do if all her subscribers suddenly dropped their subscriptions and demanded all their money back? (SHE is in a business that demands its customers pay months or even a year before getting the product).
I worry that all the idiots who click-through all those "agreements" on websites in order to get "free" stuff (facebook, gmail, instagram...) are in doing so degrading the basic concept of a contract in their own minds and thus in the overall culture.
Internet, meet capitalism.
Capitalism, meet internet.
What did you expect, Libertarian paradise?
My own experience is that favorable results are usually forthcoming right after telling a difficult vendor/provider that the next phone call will be to the state attorney general's office.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
There is no doubt that the contract stated exactly what the penalty for cancellation would be. The lady didn't read it.
It's not complicated to get out of a contract when the service is unreliable. You just have to consistently take the time to report your problem. The ISP sends a truck out to the house at their expense. The problem persists, so you call in and complain and get another truck . Repeat a few more times, get a few more trucks. Eventually the problem will be fixed or it will become apparent to the ISP that they're paying more for trucks than you're paying them for service. Then you've got good grounds for cancellation with the penalties waive. You can even ask the tech to leave a note on your file that the problem is unfixable; they're the authority on the matter.
If you sever your service before you've allowed the ISP what they consider sufficient opportunity to fix the problem, then they'll stick you every time.
Note, I call this entity Citizens as that is the bulk of past and future business, although they did buy the remnants of the old Rochester Telephone business (which had been renamed Frontier Communications), but not before the interesting parts had been spun off including their internet and cell phone components -- leaving just the old local land line business -- the buggy whip part of the communications space. After acquiring Frontier, they assumed the newly acquired entity's name as their own. Needless to say, "new" Frontier brought their mostly rural landline business to the party, and have been acquiring additional tradional land line businesses frequently in rural areas -- mostly because no other communications company want anything to do with this part of the space. After all, running new copper POTS based lines, in mostly rural areas with mostly an older, poorer clientele just seems so 70's... Additionally, young people are largely mobile focused and more affluent folks are looking for faster, more reliable cable or fiber based internet services. Lastly, as people got rid of their 2nd POTS lines decades ago when dial-up internet went the way of the dodo, and gave up the only related POTS landline for a mobile phone number or maybe a cable provided VOIP line, the old POTS infrastructure is used less and less, which means no "investment" in this antiquated technology base (kind of like the abandoned railway lines with the old telegraph signaling wire, with the old cute glass insulators -- and none of which is in use anymore). So therefore, Frontier is now in the business of riding the buggy whip part of the communications business into the ground -- and DSL might as well be ISDN -- too slow, not reliable (literally running on 50+ year old copper). They have no presence in the mobile/cell part of the market, they are not a cable company nor have they made any significant investments in fiber. So they are truly "dead man walking", and if someone "attempts" to force then to make the necessary investments to bring their "plant" up to date, without a significant increase in rates (or government subsidies), they will just go bankrupt.
Offer to subscribe. Ask them about their cancellation fees. Demand a fixed figure.
They will refuse to give clear answers.
Send the record to this paper.
One is stuck with bad contract terms because there are usually only about 2 viable carriers in the average town, and they both fuck you over the hot coals because they can: you have no choice if you want Internet.
Table-ized A.I.
"I transferred the fee using my Frontier Internet connection.
What? You didn't get it?
Maybe you should look into that; your service seems pretty unreliable."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Have a look at the rules around cancelling a service. Specifically, the bit that says:
There are reasons why I could not see myself moving to the USA. Shonky services, with no laws to limit the damage they can cause, are a significant part of those reasons...
They're all pretty much letting their copper plant rot in favor of Wireless.
It simply costs more money to maintain than they're bringing in via that medium to justify keeping it.
For standard POTS service, it's usually acceptable quality. Usually.
For data ? Forget about it. I would probably choose any other medium ( including Satellite ) before I go back to copper.
-nehumanuscrede
just find and kill the highest ranked executive you can. these fucks needs to fear for their lives before pulling shit like this.
centralized models NIgGER community '*BSD Sux0rs'. This But I'd rather hear And she r4n and/or distribute noises out of the addresses will
Doesn't America have consumer advocates and such?
Canceling is really the wrong move here.
So don't cancel, tell'em to step up and keep their part of the contract... and then stop paying until they do.
IANAL but you might even try charging them for the replacement service you needed because they didn't provide.
This is 100% bologna. I don't believe a word of it.
Find someone else to believe your lies.
no one here gives a darn about your issues.
and enjoy getting fucked in the ass by the bank and every other business they deal with on monthly basis. And the cancer. And the T2 diabetes. And probably the AIDS as well, America is the birthplace of HIV afterall.
Most people dont know that if they threaten to send you to collections, you simply say the bill is "in dispute".
Many collection agencies wont touch a debt that is in dispute.
The second point is that if privacy is a human right in your country (like it is here in New Zealand) then sharing your private and confidential contact information with a collections agency when they have no right (because the bill is not a bad debt, its simply in dispute) is a serious violation.
Most telco contracts say they can send your account to a collections agency, but only if the debt is bad. They forget to mention anything about disputed charges too.
Another ISP here in NZ was recently fined $30k because they sent a $200 bill to a collections agency after the customer had problems using the service and refused to pay.
Source: I run an ISP.
the fee is still so large that it could "put her out of business," the news report said
Since Candace Lestina essentially "inherited" the business, and the crappy service, that sounds like the service is actually in the business's name, not an individuals. So -- fold.
The Pardeeville Area Shopper declares bankruptcy from early termination fee -- but first it sells all its assets off to a new company. Company B licences/rents those same assets back to the original company to use. The bankruptcy of course means that arrangement ends. Assets are now the property of Company B. Employees (being one person) get laid off. Frontier is left holding the empty shell of the previous company, Ms Lestina moves on to the new company and starts up again under the new name.
Fine print contracts are frequently found unenforceable because reasonable people do not read them.
The pathetic thing is anyone that tries to uphold these dishonest contracts.
I frequently deal with various types of carrier network circuits, let me explain what COULD be going on here.
If one goes to order service for an area that does not already have it, it costs money to build out the path, install, and provision the equipment. Sometimes it costs a LOT of money. It would not make sense for a business to spend $5,000 to build out path for a circuit that they will make $100/month on if the customer could just cancel it the next week.
If there are problems with the circuit the carrier reasonable wants an opportunity to fix it, failing to do so would otherwise cost them a lot of money. It is fairly standard contract language that some notice of a breach of contract must be made to the carrier and that they will have some reasonable period of time to resolve the problem. Backhoes happen. Rodents happen. Shit happens.
The way to address these types of problems is to provide notice to the carrier that they are in breach of the contract and they have X days to resolve it. After that, if they fail to resolve the issue, they cannot level any early termination fees. It is also fairly easy to get out of contracts that require repeatedly notifying the carrier that they are in breach of the contract, even if they restore the service quickly.
All that said, this sounds like some sort of crappy DSL circuit, not some high speed engineered service. I would not be surprised if Frontier has less then a couple of hundred dollars sunk into this customer.
If they failed to reasonably provide their provision of the contract, notify them as per the contract (or in any reasonable manner) and say so. Say that you don't consider the contract fulfilled, and will be terminating based on their failure to fulfil it.
Give them a reasonable time, etc. Keep telling them. Keep telling them it's not adequate.
Then... cancel the contract. If the contract was never fulfilled, then it's as if it never existed, thus any "agreed" cancellation fee never was agreed at all. They didn't hold up their side, so you don't need to hold up yours at that point.
However, you have to have notified them (just because the contract says a certain way doesn't mean it *has* to be that way, but it's best to play their game... imagine if you went to court and had to explain how you did things... "Not only did I go through their cancellation forms online, your honour, but I also wrote them a registered-delivery letter which I have proof they received, got no reply, joined into a web-chat which I have provided a transcript of, telephoned them for 45 minutes which I have the phone bill here to prove, and still I was unable to cancel the contract".
You don't *need* to go to court... it's far too petty for that. But you act as if you were gathering evidence for a court. Any court will take steps to side with the party that was being reasonable, expressing their concerns, trying to do things properly, trying to make sure they didn't get into trouble, trying to give the other side a decent chance to rectify.
And because you operate like that, the right people at the company - when it gets escalated to the very-real threat of a court case (i.e. a summons to court) - they will look at how you have been doing things, realise that they stand no chance, and likely settle.
Even before that, though, most senior people in a complaints department have an ear for things like that... they can tell the ones who *are* prepared and are keeping every correspondence and will more likely pay to keep those people away while batting away all the "I'LL SUE YOU! GIVE ME MY PRODUCT FOR FREE AND A YEAR'S CREDIT OR I'LL SUE YOU!" idiots.
If they haven't provided a reasonable interpretation of the product/service they said they would, and haven't rectified that despite being given more than enough chance, then you notify and cancel. They'll say you can't, and all kinds of things. But, fact is, if they haven't reasonably complied with their end of the contract, the contract is null and void. Not only that, if it's *never* been fulfilled, you can most likely get all the money back that you've ever paid them. Even "non-returnable deposits" and things like that.
No delivery, no contract. No contract, no cancellation charge. No cancellation charge, no debt to them.
Seek advice if you're not good at these things.
[[I've never needed to and though I don't do stuff 100% official, I'm sure, I research and I always get a decent outcome and have variously been threatened with court (dozens of times), bailiffs, and all kinds - and yet never once had any of those things even started, and in fact had people pay me "not to take it to court, right?" because they were so far in the wrong they didn't even realise until I presented the evidence to them. Insurance companies, telecommunications providers, landlords, letting agents, banks, ... all kinds of companies have come unstuck when they just go through the "standard procedure" and I actually have a genuine grievance that they don't handle.
I've had money for an entire contract term forcibly ripped back out of their accounts going back months (have to love UK Direct Debit law... I got a very polite phone call literally two minutes later...), I've had insurance companies mess up so bad they begged for me to not take them to court, I've turned "We're going to take you to court" into "Oh.... sorry... no, that's absolutely our mistake, here's a cheque" (often a few days after I say "No problem, I have copies of
The AT&T breakup dealt with the long distance phone monopoly (MCI was using microwave transmitters to send voice over the long distance leg, turning a long distance call into two local calls plus their microwave hop; hence their name - Microwave Communications Inc). It didn't touch the government-granted local phone monopolies. Each region still had just one phone company which owned the lines and provided service. The AT&T breakup just made it so most long-distance calls went between two different phone companies, instead of within a single company.
Yeah they allowed local phone competition, but all the competitors had to use the monopoly phone company's phone lines. The monopoly company exploited this to drag service and repair requests for competing companies out for days, even weeks. And the customer would get mad at the competitor they were using, instead of at the monopoly phone company who owned the lines. I had to deal with this BS when setting up T1 service at a business. The service was with Speakeasy, but they leased the line from Verizon since Verizon was the monopoly phone provider in the area. The line had problems every time it rained. Speakeasy would take my service request immediately and submit a repair ticket with Verizon. Verizon would drag it out for a week, and when they tested the line a week later (when it was no longer raining), miracle of miracles! The line would test just fine and they would close the ticket. This went on for years until while upgrading service I just happened to get a call from Speakeasy and the Verizon service rep wiring the new line while it was raining. I immediately asked him to test it, and sure enough it was drowning in static. That got them to finally admit the line was faulty and send someone out to find the problem and fix it.
That's what's going on here. Frontier is the government-anointed monopoly service provider for the area. Because they own the lines, when their service quality sucks because of poor line quality, every DSL provider's service sucks equally because they're all using Frontier's lines. So Frontier has no incentive to repair or upgrade their lines. It doesn't impact the competitiveness of their business, and fixing things would just cost them more money The government agency regulating their monopoly (your state's public utilities commission) is supposed to make them behave, but they're largely ineffectual.
The way the local phone service should be done is like gas or electric service. You don't want a rat's nest of lines like India, so you do want only one company installing lines. That monopoly company installs and maintains the gas and power lines, but they're prohibited from selling gas or electricity. Instead, you can buy your gas and electricity from dozens/hundreds of companies selling those products. They all pay a transmission fee to the monopoly company, all of them paying the same fee. The fee is regulated by the PUC who looks into the monopoly company's financials each year to guarantee they're making only a certain percentage profit.
The failure of government regulators to set up phone service this way makes this squarely a failure of government regulation. If you were willing to have the rat's nest of lines and followed the Libertarian model allowing competing phone services, any company not maintaining and upgrading their lines would be committing economic suicide, and would die off. Only the companies which maintained their lines would survive.
I am surprised any business would not know how bad Frontier is about speed? I am also surprised any business would accept such a inflated termination fee in the first place. Probably the best option is counter file a law suit claiming breech of contract because Frontier did not provide promised service.
Frontier have failed to provide service and therefore they are in breech of contract (non supply of service). It isn't cancellation from her end, it is breech from theirs. Of course, being the USA it has some REALLY fucked up laws and it may be that she will just be lawyered into submission by your fucking ridiculous legal system (not justice, legal) and it may even attempt to say she has no recourse.
The contracts are government enforced, not business enforced, yet you will neither let that be removed (no contracts are binding) nor will you refrain from making it government interference if capitalism, yet again, fails. Because your religious dogma will not allow it to be capitalism's fault, even when it is.
It isn't a government anointed monopoly: there's another player in town. What happened is capitalism did not supply competitors.
A friend of mine paid the local cable company to run fiber to his home by getting a business line installed. After the contract was done he went back to a normal home plan but now he had a higher quality line feeding the house.
Maybe the fee from frontier is to cover the installation cost. Now if the service sucked then they don't deserve anything but if her claims are exaggerated then she's out of luck.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Living in and near WV, I can tell you that frontier is very aware of how bad their business is, and does not care.
I was in a situation, years ago now, where Frontier was my only option for Internet service.
They were terrible. It was frequently out (several times a month), they forced me to pay a modem rental even though I had my own DSL modem at the time (I did end up using theirs because they wouldn't take it back or stop charging me monthly for it), they would send me nasty letters if I used over 100GB of bandwidth in a month and getting anyone on the phone was at least an hour hold with frequent inexplicable dropped connections.
I liked the location I was in but that stands out as my worst service provider experience I have ever had.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Connect a blotto to the line, an old neon sign transformer.
wanted to send a 'shame on you' to the frontier PR folks via their public 'contact us'. Well, its broken. Either frontier took it down or a slashdot reader broke it.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/02/23/0022238/frontier-demands-4300-cancellation-fee-despite-horribly-slow-internet
In 2007 Frontier claimed that my brother had signed up for third party services three months after his death.
leaving it to my horse
I live in Palm Springs, California. A few years ago, Verizon tranferred their FIOS business in the Coachella Valley to Frontier. When Frontier took over, it was a freaking nightmare. One local business lost their phone service for two weeks. Imagine trying to run a business when customers cannot call in.
Worse, another Frontier issue resulted in the 911 system going down for the entire valley.
Frontier is a horrible, horrible company that needs to go away.
it would cost more to litigate than to pay. This is not by accident. Companies will often set fees to just that threshold.
It works both ways too. If you rack up a bunch of credit card debt with different cards but it's not enough to be worth suing over then your CC company will debt swap with other companies until it's enough and come after you. I saw this a lot in 2009.
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I'm from Wisconsin and Frontier is a garbage DSL provider with ancient infrastructure who charges roughly double for internet because they operate almost exclusively in small towns and rural areas. They have a HORRIBLE reputation for customer support, fixing things, billing, etc and they don't care. Everyone hates them and nobody in their right mind renews a contract with them at this point. They're basically TDS too where they no longer want to be an ISP but they can't just cut off customers so they tend to do zero marketing and get zero new customers.
We have two choices for internet access (like most Americans). They both suck. Over the years, one will get bad, and the other will improve, so we generally switch ISP's every 3-5 years. Sometimes quicker. We often have a leftover contract. We just let the shitty ISP dangle. The ship it off to collections and ding our credit. I don't really give a shit and just ignore them.
We need internet access regulated by the Feds asap. The current situation sucks.
I don't respond to AC's.
Chicken appeals to fox to confirm that it's still hungry.
Requiem for the American Dream
Frontier is a joke. I had them as my only option for over 10 years, once we moved past dial-up they were worthless (they where worthless as a phone provider as well.)
They were installing fiber optic cable as some sort of government funded project last year, dug up several water mains and a few gas lines because they couldn't wait for the city to mark everything.
I long since moved off to a wireless ISP, and have been WAY happier ever since.
However, the claim you made about the contract is not in evidence in either the summary or the article, so you're even more guilty of what you complained of...
and libertarians demand that the role for govenment is enforcing contracts. So please explain how this is NOT due to the free market? The government did not mandate the terms of the contract and there's nothing about it being an un free market that would have changed. The termination penalty has come in when there was an alternative, and one was always possible: the free market did not decide to put competition in. Not government forbid it.
This is why libertarians are always wrong: they will REFUSE to see reality and will just put anything in as "this was not the free market", when everything they want refutes the free market. IF it were a free market, contracts would be unenforceable, since such force would be interference in the free trading of equals.
it is those capitalists in the free market making the regulation.
If they were not allowed to get government to do their enforcement, contracts would be unenforceable due to nobody being there to enforce it. Moron.
you're WAY off base here. Your brain has been pickled in years of big government propaganda.
The problem you're not facing is that the telco industry is very heavily government regulated at the federal, state, and even local level. Get all three layers of government off the backs of businesses and if there is any money to be made providing a service, somebody will step in with better performance, lower prices, or both in order to try to grab some of that available cash. The reason most Americans are stuck with only one provider and therefore NO competition and NO free market effects is that the feds and the states regulate so much that costs to enter the market are sky high and then simultaneously most local politicians have had their communities quietly strike special deals with a single provider and keep competitors out with the use of right-of-way regulations. The local phone company and the local cable provider who back certain politicians are allowed to run their wires all over town, but nobody else can.
If the politics are rotten, the free market cannot operate, and a government option in such a corrupt situation is only gonna multiply the corruption. The solution is competition and complete openness about all regulations and campaign contributions.
the problem in a way you probably did not intend.
Minnesota is so far to the political left that the Democrats are considered "too conservative" and they have the DFL instead. This retarded excuse for a state over-taxes and over-regulates everything and then wonders why its state-enforced monopoly of a rotten service provider is doing a bad job???? They put all sorts of regulations on their law books, which lock-out any would-be competition, and then they allow the monpoly provider they have protected to run rough-shod over their citizens for YEARS without enforcing the rules on THEM - this is the big flashing neon sign that says "CAUTION: POLITICAL CORRUPTION AND COLLUSION AT WORK"
Hey, comrades, The Party is baking crappy bread with sawdust instead of flour.... who'da thunk it?!?!?
I'll know that some sanity has engaged in Minn and they truly care about the actual customers, rather than the ISSUE for POLITICAL campaign arguments, when they open up to competitors and smack-down the monopoly they themselves and their corrupt politicians enabled.
Just don't pay the fee and enjoy life. Frontier (anyone) can't put that on your credit report for months without some major collection agency calls, which you do not answer.
In most cases nothing will happen to you, and Frontier is out the money and can suck it.
NOTHING is more important that NOT paying early termination fees. Go out of your way to NEVER pay them.
Notice that nothing happens to you.
Because you clearly haven't been paying attention to the rules in the USA for the last 30+ years...
The current situation is caused by federal regulation pissing away taxpayer dollars and limiting competiton. See Telecom act of 1996 and more-recently, Idjit Pai.