Most connectivity RFPs are recycled templates. They ask about megabits, ports, and monthly rates. They almost never ask about the operating model behind those numbers, which is what actually determines whether the relationship works when something goes wrong at 2am on a Saturday.
The questions below come from watching what multi-site businesses wish they had asked. They are written to surface the difference between a provider's marketing language and how the company actually runs. None of them require a technical background. All of them have answers that are easy to recognize as good or weak when you hear them.
Take the answers in writing. The questions you ask before signing are the only ones that get answered honestly.
Network and ownership
1. Do you own your network, or are you reselling someone else's?
This is the most important question, and almost nobody asks it. A provider that owns its backbone controls the routing, the capacity, the upgrades, and the resolution path when something breaks. A reseller depends on the underlying carrier for all of that, then layers its own SLA on top of someone else's reality.
A strong answer is direct: "Yes, we own and operate our backbone, and here is our AS number." A weaker answer talks about partnerships and relationships without naming the actual network your traffic rides on.
2. Where does my voice and data actually live?
For Canadian businesses, this is a data residency question. Some providers host voice in US data centers and route Canadian calls across the border. That can have privacy, latency, and regulatory implications you did not sign up for. The same applies to managed services and security. It is also where the broader copper-retirement conversation in Canada intersects with vendor selection: as analog services are withdrawn, where the replacement voice platform lives matters more, not less.
A strong answer specifies the country and city of the hosting infrastructure. For voice, it specifies whether the cloud PBX is Canadian-hosted. For data, it specifies the jurisdiction your traffic transits and rests in.
3. What happens at locations you do not directly serve?
No provider serves every postal code in Canada. The question is what they do at the gaps. Some pass you to a wholesale arrangement and you end up with the same finger-pointing you were trying to avoid. Others integrate third-party circuits into their own management plane so the experience is the same regardless of who owns the last mile.
A strong answer describes how the provider stays accountable for sites it does not directly serve. A weaker answer treats those sites as your problem.
Service and support
4. What is your resolution time objective?
Uptime numbers are easy to put in a marketing brochure. Resolution time objectives are harder to fake. The question is not just "what is your uptime percentage," it is "when something breaks, how long until it is fixed."
A strong answer is specific. Frontier publishes a 0 to 4 hour resolution objective. A weaker answer gives you uptime percentages without resolution commitments, or buries the actual response time inside a premium service tier.
5. When something breaks, who calls who?
Most traditional carriers run reactive support. A circuit goes down, the alarm fires somewhere in their NOC, and the resolution depends on you noticing and opening a ticket. A proactive model flips that. The provider monitors, detects, and calls you, often before you know there is a problem.
A strong answer is something like: "We call you. Our NOC monitors your sites and we open the ticket on your behalf." A weaker answer points you to a portal and a phone tree.
6. Where is your support team based?
This matters more than people think. A support team in your time zone, speaking your business language, and reachable on your timeline is a different experience from a queue routed through an offshore call center at 3am.
A strong answer names the country, sometimes the city. For Canadian businesses, "our support team is Canadian-based" is a clean answer. A weaker answer is vague about location, or describes "global coverage" in a way that means "the cheapest option at any given hour."
7. Are field service charges included, or billed separately?
This is the single line item most RFPs forget to ask about, and the one that hurts most in practice. A traditional carrier bills per truck roll. Every site visit is a charge, with after-hours premiums and minimum trip fees layered on top. For a multi-site business that opens, closes, and renovates locations regularly, this adds up to a meaningful percentage of the annual contract.
A strong answer is "no field service charges, ever." A weaker answer breaks out trip charges, service call minimums, and after-hours premiums by tier.
Scale and contracts
8. Can you coordinate rollouts across multiple sites?
Many providers are great at one site. They are not great at fifty sites going live in a calendar quarter. Multi-site coordination is a different operational competency from selling internet circuits. The question is whether the provider has the project management muscle to schedule installs, ship pre-staged equipment, dispatch field technicians across regions, and bring sites live on a predictable cadence.
A strong answer includes named project managers, a documented rollout playbook, and references at scale. A weaker answer is "we will figure it out together."
9. How do you handle a migration when my existing contracts overlap?
Most multi-site businesses do not get the luxury of starting from scratch. They have existing carrier contracts with different end dates across different regions. A provider that can only handle a clean-sheet migration is not useful in that situation.
A strong answer is a phased migration model. The provider takes new sites first, takes existing sites as their contracts come up for renewal, and absorbs the complexity of running two networks side by side during the transition. A weaker answer pushes the timing problem back to you.
10. What is actually in the contract beyond the price?
The headline rate is the easiest part of a connectivity contract to compare. The hard part is everything else. Term length. Renewal automatic or manual. Price escalators in years two and three. What happens if you grow. What happens if you shrink. What it costs to exit early. What changes if your usage profile changes.
A strong answer is a clear contract with no surprises. A weaker answer is a low headline rate with everything else in the fine print.
What to do with the answers
The point of these ten questions is not to find a provider with a perfect score. It is to expose the gap between a provider's marketing language and its operating reality. Most providers will answer some of these strongly and some weakly. What matters is whether the weak answers describe parts of their business you can live with, and whether the strong answers describe the parts you cannot live without.
The questions are also a useful internal exercise. Ranking your own answers, before you talk to providers, tells you what you actually care about and what you have been negotiating on out of habit.
Where Frontier fits
Frontier built around these answers. We own and operate our own national backbone (AS7311), run our own NOC, and host TrueVoice in Canadian data centers. Our resolution time objective is 0 to 4 hours. When something needs attention, we call you. There are no field service charges. Our support team is Canadian-based.
For multi-site businesses, the coordinated rollout playbook is built into how we operate nationwide, not bolted on for a specific deal. The customer stories on our case studies page describe the model in detail across four very different situations: carrier consolidation, growth, phased migration, and recovery from vendor disruption.
If we are not the right fit, the questions still hold. They are written to help you choose well, whether or not Frontier ends up on your shortlist.
What to do next
If you are running a connectivity RFP this quarter and you want candid answers to these ten questions, we can do that. No formal RFP response required for an initial conversation. Walk us through your environment and we will tell you what we would do, where we fit, and where someone else might be a better choice.
That has been the Frontier model for more than two decades.
