There's yet another uproar over an ISP imposing Internet data caps on its customers and charging users who exceed them several hundred dollars a month. This time around, the service in question isn't Time Warner Cable—it's Minnesota-based telco Frontier Communications. Frontier isn't the biggest player on the block, but its network includes 2.8 million voice/broadband connections, the company generated $2.2 billion in revenue in 2008—and if you're a rural Verizon customer, Frontier could soon be your ISP.

Disclosure of Frontier's new pricing schedule comes from the outraged pages of stopthecap.com.

"Sources tell Stop the Cap! the Internet Overcharging scheme Frontier is running is an experiment to gauge customer reaction," the group's latest blog post discloses. "If the furious customer e-mail reaching us is any indication, it's another public relations disaster for Frontier Communications. One customer didn't even realize there was a 5GB usage allowance to begin with, much less a vastly higher new monthly price if he wants to stay with Frontier DSL. He's not."

The "vastly higher" monthly prices are indeed way up there, as indicated by the customer notification letters that Stop the Cap! obtained and published.

"Dear [Customer]: Frontier is focused on providing the best possible internet experience across our entire customer base. We bring you a quality service at a fair price, dependent upon an average monthly bandwidth usage of 5GB. Over the past months, your account is in violation of our Residential Internet Acceptable Use Policy. Our policy states that Frontier reserves the right to suspend, terminate or apply additional charges to the Service if such usage exceeds a reasonable amount of usage. A reasonable amount of usage is defined as 5GB combined upload and download consumption during the course of a 30-day billing period. We realize there are times when our customers use the internet for services such as video and music downloads, however your specific usage has consistently exceeded 100GB over a 30 day period. We would like to provide you with the option of keeping your Frontier internet service at a monthly rate of $99.99 which is reflective of your average monthly usage."

A similarly worded letter goes out to naughty subscribers who have been identified as consuming 250GB over a 30-day period. They're invited to stay with Frontier at the "reflective" rate of $249.99 a month.

Did we mention that all of this hubbub is about a DSL connection that is "up to" 3Mbps? And that basic plans for this anemic connection start at $49.99/month?

In major use

We're going to go out on a limb and call these rates expensive. After all, before withdrawing its plan, TWC caused something close to a national broadband riot by proposing an experimental pricing scheme for its 100GB/month tier at $75 per month. Frontier's version is $24.99 higher for the same data level.

So we called Frontier and got the telco's Steve Crosby, Senior Vice President of Communications, who surprised us by disclosing that these missives are going out to Frontier customers in only one location.

"We're sending these letters out to a handful of subscribers in Mound, Minnesota," Crosby said. "They're in major use of the network."

We had to ask Crosby to repeat the name of that town several times just to make sure we got it right, but yes Virginia, there is a Mound, Minnesota. Located on the western fringe of the Twin Cities, it has 9,435 residents, all of them surrounded by Lake Minnetonka. "The city for all seasons," Mound's website proclaims. Mound's biggest claim to fame is that it is the birthplace of the Tonka Truck toy—named, of course, after the aforementioned body of water.

We asked Frontier what the broadband subscribers of Mound did to deserve this policy. They were "very simply, excessive residential users," Crosby explained.

How excessive, we pressed. "Hundreds of gigabytes," he responded. A month? A week? we wondered. "I don't have that in front of me right now," he replied.

What are they doing with this excess use? "We're not detectives," Crosby responded. "We just know that there's been an excessive amount of usage."

"When you said, 'a handful,' is that literally true?" we pressed. "Something like from one to five people?"

Crosby paused. "Under 100," he replied.

Will Frontier be developing a system to let the residents of Mound know when they've approached 100GB or 250GB?

"We're evaluating that currently," he disclosed. "Education of a customer is an important thing. So we're looking at ways of educating our customers as to their usage."

And this bandwidth pricing system is really, truly, honest-to-Minnetonka just for Mound? Frontier is not planning on expanding it elsewhere?

"Currently we have no intention of expanding it beyond that," Crosby pledged.

Pure rural

But it's the appearance of the word "currently" that worries us, because Frontier wants to expand its services well beyond The Land of 10,000 Lakes. The company's big plan is to acquire $8.6 billion worth of assets from Verizon in Arizona, California, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Washington, Wisconsin, and West Virginia.

Once state governments and the Federal Communications Commission have approved these purchases, Frontier will own 4.8 million more access lines, with a million high speed Internet customers and 69,000 FiOS video subscribers. Total voice and broadband connections added: 5.8 million.

These acquisitions, Frontier promises, will create the nation's "largest pure rural communications services provider" and the fifth largest incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC). The expanded entity will have seven million access lines, 8.6 million voice and broadband connections, 1.6 million broadband subscribers, and about 350,000 satellite and FiOS video buyers.

Plus a few subscribers in Mound, Minnesota, stuck paying $100 a month... for slow DSL.

At least so far.