My brother just switched his house in exurban Tampa from Frontier to Spectrum. Frontier took over from Verizon/FIOS about 4 years ago and it was a disaster. The system crashed and took weeks to get fully restored, but that didn't stop Frontier from putting a stop to all of its "promotional" pricing. But since it's a rental house and...other....reasons....he stayed with him. But finally last week, he had enough and is getting better service for about $165 monthly (net, tv, landline) versus over $350 for Frontier. I thought that Frontier could have had a nice, profitable business taking over legacy systems and just running them as sleepy little franchises that should be consistently profitable. A friend of mine used to run a cable franchise in Sun City Center, which is a planned retirement community south of Tampa, told me that he figured out that he could run it profitably by keeping the service consistent and jacking up the rate a buck a month. I figured that would be Frontier's idea, but no... Anyway, the FIOS system is fiber optic and it's hard to believe they could be so incompetent, but the stock price doesn't lie. In the last 10 years their stock price has fallen from $140 per share to (wait for it).... 59 cents. I used to think that cable franchises and casinos were the two things that were the nearest things to a license to print money, but I've been convinced otherwise... *end rant*
