A year ago last November, Steve and I finally cut the cord. We gave up our cable TV service and switched everything over to streaming using YouTube TV. That left only two things with our ISP Frontier: our FiOS Internet and our landline phone. We’ve saved a fortune from cutting the cord, and by fortune, I mean $1217/per year. That’s not chump change.

When I negotiated the pricing with Frontier, the lovely person who helped me get set up told me that I was getting promotional pricing. I remember saying to her, “So when this promotional pricing is over, I just call back and you find me new promotional pricing, right?” And she said, “Yep, that’s how it works.”

Well, 2 months ago Steve came to me with our Frontier bill and it had gone up by $10/month. I looked at it and $10 wasn’t enough for me to take on that battle so we decided to let it ride. But then it went up a bit more and then even more. After 3 months of this, our Frontier bill had gone from $62 to $94, which is an increase of 50%! It was time to call Frontier.

I called them on the phone and was greeted with those dreaded words, “We’re experiencing greater than expected call volumes.” The recording offered to have someone call me back in 25 minutes and I wouldn’t lose my place in line. I agreed, and at 25 minutes exactly, the phone rang and I was connected to Tiffany.

After exchanging pleasantries with Tiffany, I simply said, “My bill went up 50% and I don’t want to pay that, so how do we make it go back down?” She said she could help, did a bit of typing on her end, put me on hold, and then transferred me to Kiandra.

As is often the case with this kind of thing, Kiandra came on with no idea what I wanted. I was a smidge aggravated, but then she said, “I’m in Retention”. Those are magical words because they mean her job is to make me happy so I won’t leave Frontier.

I told Kiandra that I would be delighted to repeat what I’d explained to Tiffany just a few minutes ago. Kiandra took just a couple of minutes to come up with a promotional deal that made my new bill a dollar and a half less than it was before they started increasing our bill!

I thought we were done – but Kiandra had more for me. She pointed out that we had a landline (and I had to apologize for being old school). She said that she was obligated to let me know that landline phones require power to operate and that in the event of a power outage, the phone wouldn’t work. I didn’t tell her that we have a whole-home battery with our Tesla Powerwalls because I wanted to see where she was going with this.

She went on to tell me that she could send me a battery to put on our modem so we’d still have phone service if we lost power. I wasn’t going to do this of course, but I asked her how much it would cost. She told me that since I lived in California, she was required to give it to me for free. Well, heck, a free battery that I don’t need sounded pretty good so I told her to sign me up.

After I got off the phone, I told Steve and he questioned why I accepted a battery if I didn’t need it. I said, “Cuz it’s a free battery.” He still didn’t get it.

A few days later a package came from Frontier, but it was too light to be a battery. I opened it up and inside was something unexpected. It was an Eero 6 Plus mesh router with a power supply and an Ethernet cable. The 6 Plus is touted as the “most affordable” of the Eero lineup, but it’s still a dual-band router that supports gigabit speeds and if bought individually, they’re $140! That’s way better than a battery I don’t need.

I thought about calling Frontier and telling them they had made a mistake, but in my experience giving things back to companies is often very difficult. I remember years ago when Nordstrom made a $100 error in my favor and I talked to three different people who couldn’t figure out how to take the money back.

I was still struggling with the moral dilemma of whether to spend my time trying to give the Eero back when our buddy Ron came over for dinner. I told him the story and he said that Frontier had sent him a battery a year or so ago, and it turned out to be something he couldn’t even use.

FiOS stands for Fiber Optic Service, and it means that the service is delivered to you over fiber optic cables that transmit information as light. That light has to be separated into TV, voice, and data as electrical signals into your home. The box that does this translation from optical to electrical energy and separates the signals is called an optical network terminal, or ONT. The ONT is often outside the home or inside the garage.

The battery Frontier sent to Ron was for the ONT. But what they didn’t remember was that they had just replaced his ONT with a version that doesn’t require a battery to remain functional in a power outage. We’re not sure how it does that but he’s had a few outages and his Internet and phone service stayed up. His ONT does have a circular port on it that says “backup” but the cable on the battery had a different-sized circular plug.

Once I heard Ron’s story, we imagined Phil in shipping at Frontier just grabbing any old box he could get his hands on and shipping them out when he got an order. I didn’t want to get Phil into trouble, so I added the Eero 6 Plus to my network so now I have 6 Eeros flooding my house with the WiFis. 6 seems like overkill but my cell phone on WiFi calling never worked near my refrigerator till I set that 6th one up in the kitchen.

But then a few days later … another package arrived from Frontier. I think Phil in shipping outdid himself on this one. It wasn’t another Eero. It wasn’t a battery for my modem as Kiandra had told me I’d be receiving. And it wasn’t exactly a battery for my ONT. It was a plastic box into which I could put TWELVE D-Cell batteries and then plug the box into my ONT. Seriously. 12 D-Cells.

I didn’t even bother to see if the plug would fit into our ONT because there was no way I was going to invest in 12 D-Cell batteries, and then put the box outdoors to see how long they would take to corrode. Also, there’s no room in the box where the ONT lives on the side of my house to fit another battery box.

I should also mention that in addition to our whole-home battery, we already have a battery attached to our ONT. I would have mentioned this to Kiandra if she’d told me it was an ONT battery they were going to send, but she said it was for our modem. I guess I’ve learned that a free battery doesn’t always mean a free battery.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is that you should always always always call your Internet service provider if they raise your rates because you just might get them to make it go back down. Other than the 25 minutes to be called back (when I wasn’t really inconvenienced), my time on the phone was no more than 7 minutes.

If they offer to send you something free, say yes because Phil might find you a nice Eero mesh router. Then again he might send you something ready-made for hazardous waste disposal.