Is it half empty or half full? Oops.
I love red meat on a Friday night (h/t to the Baller Herbst List for the heads up). Broadband/DSLreports.com has a delicious post detailing the public meltdown of a Frontier Communications executive when pressed on the highly technical question of “just how freaking fast is your DSL in West Virginia?”…
‘I’ll have an engineer talk to you about the technology we use on that,’ said [Dana] Waldo, senior vice president and general manager of Frontier’s West Virginia operations.
When [a competitor] alleged that Frontier’s broadband DSL service does not offer the 1-megabit upload speed, Waldo was unable to actually answer the question and instead decided to get personal:
“That is not correct, Jim,” Waldo said. “I wasn’t going to bring this up, but I am absolutely beside myself. I feel so sorry for you, that you are so desperate to make you and Citynet relevant and, apparently, keep it afloat. Jim, it’s over. I’m done talking to you. I’m done … wasting my time responding to your mischaracterizations. I’m not going to sit here and waste my time and hear more of his nonsense,” Waldo continued. “I’ll excuse myself.”
It happened while officials were considering a grant to subsidise competitive service in a local area where Frontier is supposed to be delivering Internet connections at West Virginia’s minimum standard of 4 Mbps down/1 Mbps up.
It might just be that Frontier has sent a man to match West Virginia’s mountains. Well, OK, hills. The state has its own broadband project problems. It’s in a battle with the federal government over allegedly misspent broadband stimulus money. Keep in mind, despite what it says on the license plates, the unofficial state motto is “thank god for Mississippi or we’d be 50th in everything”.