Why almost no provider will tell you how long you'll wait on hold.

Call your current provider's support line and start a stopwatch. Not the sales line, which tends to get answered fast for reasons that are easy to guess. The support line. The one you would be calling with a site down and a room full of people who cannot process a payment.

You already have a rough idea of how that call goes. Most operators do. It is not a happy picture, and it usually ends with a callback that comes whenever it comes. What you almost certainly cannot do is find the actual wait time written down anywhere before you sign. Providers will quote their uptime to three decimal places. They will show you a network map and a service level agreement measured in restoration hours. Almost none of them will tell you how long the phone rings before a human answers.

For a multi-site business, that silence is expensive. You are not managing one support relationship. You are managing the same one across every location, and the phone is where the whole thing gets tested.

The one support number nobody publishes

Any provider running a phone queue is already sitting on this data. The software that routes your call records the second it arrives, the second an agent answers, and the second a caller gives up. Answer rate and average wait fall out of that automatically. Nobody has to commission a study. The number exists the moment the phone system is switched on.

So when a provider will not share it, there are only a few honest explanations. They are not looking at it. They are looking at it and would prefer you did not. Or the number is bad enough that publishing it would cost them deals.

You can usually guess which. Think about the last time you called a major carrier's support line as a customer. The hold was not measured in seconds. It was measured in the part of the afternoon you lost, and it often ended with a promise to call you back rather than a fix. That experience is common enough that most operators have simply stopped expecting anything better. The silence in the sales process is not an accident. It is the number staying out of sight.

What a published number has to include to mean anything

Here is the part that separates a real figure from a decorative one, and almost nobody states it. Call queue software measures wait time in stages. There is the phone menu at the front, the greeting and the press-one-for-this, and then there is the queue behind it where you wait for an agent. A provider can report on either and call it their wait time.

So the honest way to publish a number is to say exactly what it measures. Not "average wait, twenty seconds" with no context, but where the clock starts and where it stops. A figure without that is not verifiable, and a figure you cannot verify is just a nicer way of saying nothing.

This is worth holding any provider to, including us. When Frontier publishes an average hold of nineteen seconds, that is measured from the moment you select your department in the menu to the moment a person picks up. We say so plainly, on the page, because the measurement is the point. A number you cannot pin down is a number you cannot trust, and a provider who will not tell you what their figure counts has told you something already.

Why speed to a human is the number that matters

Strip away the jargon and there is really one question a support line has to answer. When something breaks, how fast do you reach a person who can help.

Not a menu. Not a ticket portal. Not a promise of a callback inside some window. A person. For a business with the connection down, every second before that moment is downtime with nobody assigned to it, and the meter is running on your revenue, not the provider's. Reaching a live agent in nineteen seconds and reaching one in fifteen minutes are not two points on the same scale. They are two different experiences of what it means to have support at all.

For a multi-site operator the gap compounds. A slow support line is not one bad afternoon. It is the same delay every time anything breaks at any location, multiplied across the whole estate. At that scale, how fast the phone gets answered stops being a courtesy and starts behaving like infrastructure. It belongs in the same conversation as uptime, because a support desk you cannot reach stretches every incident by however long the queue runs.

What to ask a provider about their support line

You do not need to take any provider's word for this, including Frontier's. You need to ask questions that a vague answer cannot survive. These sit alongside the ones in our guide on questions to ask a connectivity provider before you sign.

Ask what their average time to reach a live agent is, and ask what it is measured from. A strong answer gives you a number and tells you exactly where the clock starts and stops. A weak answer gives you a number with no context, or no number at all.

Ask whether the figure covers the support line specifically, or an average across every line they run. A strong answer reports the support queue on its own. A weak answer blends a busy support line with quiet internal ones to produce a friendlier average.

Ask whether the queue is staffed after hours, then ask what share of after-hours calls actually get answered. Keeping a line open overnight and staffing it are two different things.

A provider who can answer those cleanly is telling you something real. A provider who redirects to uptime percentages when you ask about the phone is also telling you something.

Where Frontier fits

Frontier publishes what most providers keep quiet. Our support performance page reports the answer rate and average hold time for our round-the-clock support queue, measured from the moment you select your department to the moment a person picks up. As it stands, ninety-five point eight percent of calls reach a live agent, and the average hold is nineteen seconds, every hour of every day. Those numbers are on a page you can read and a line you can dial. If they are wrong, you will find out by testing them, which is the entire reason we put them where anyone can.

That fits how Frontier already operates. We own and run our own national backbone and NOC, our support team is Canadian-based, our resolution time objective is zero to four hours, and there are no field service charges. The full support numbers, including the quarter by quarter trend, live on the support performance page.

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 list.

What to do next

If you are running a connectivity RFP this quarter, put the support questions in it. Ask every provider on your shortlist how fast you reach a live agent and what that number is measured from, and watch which ones can answer without changing the subject. If you want to see what a published answer looks like first, ours is on the support performance page, and the line is printed at the bottom for anyone who wants to time it.