|
||||||
|
Telephone Trouble in Northern New England
By Laura Knoy on Wednesday, September 9, 2009.
The company in charge of our region’s phone lines, FairPoint Communications, has faced myriad problems: from customer service to fiscal uncertainty. Now state officials in Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire are losing patience. We’ll look at how we arrived at this telecom turmoil and ask about the future of our phones.
Guests
- David Darman, business reporter for New Hampshire Public Radio
- John Dillon, reporter for Vermont Public Radio
- Meredith Hatfield, Consumer Advocate for New Hampshire
We'll also hear from
- Peter Nixon, president of FairPoint Communications
- Anne Ross, general counsel for the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
Google
Yahoocomments
All comments are moderated before appearing on the site. Comments must adhere to the NHPR.org comment guidelines and terms of use.
Many, many people predicted all of these problems (although I doubt anyone saw just how quickly they would surface) and vociferously opposed the deal before the PUC. Commissioner Morrison was the only one of the three commissioners who understood that this would be a disaster for NH. Fairpoint was simply too small and too technologically primitive and lacked the financial resources to swallow up VZ in northern New England. The southern part of the state lost forever the opportunity to expand FiOS service, which for consumers is the gold standard. It pains me to see VZ aggressively promoting FiOS in neighboring Massachusetts while we are stuck with the cable companies, who now face no opposition. Comcast is probably the only one to gain from the deal. I'm very angry with the PUC and blame them far more than Fairpoint for letting this deal go through in the first place. Why aren't they accountable too for this disastrous error of judgement?
I agree totally , I blame the PUC to they should never allowed this to go through and they should be held accountable , they set us up for disaster and I think everyone agrees
I was really unaware of any other options other then Fairpoint for my local and long distance telephone, and DSL internet. Could you tell me what else is out there. Fairpoint has lost all my respect as a company that I want to do business with. Obviously management is not up for the task. Everything was all set up by Verizon. All Fairpoint had to do was change their name and flick a switch.
My experiance has to do with internet,some months ago I had lost internet service. Upon reporting the proplem I was told that a serviceman would contact me in a few days,when this happened the message was that the proplem was not local,but up the line perhaps in Manchester, NH (I am in Harrison,Me.).Also that I would be contacted, this did not happen so after several days. I was told that the techs were woking on the problem,after waiting a week I called again and told the same thing,fthis happened again after which I insisted on speaking to a supervisor who told me that about three thousan peopl in northern NE had the same problem and that HE COULDN'T TELL ME WHEN IT WOULD BE FIXED BECAUSE THE TECHS WOULDN'T RETURN CALLS.
THANKS GEORGE
A few things....your alternatives to Fairpoint for phone and internet service could be some of the following: a cable provider or satellite provider and even a cell phone provider, depending on where you live and what your access to these might be. Companies are in this to make money, and if it doesn't make financial sense to put up a cell tower in an area where they might get only a handful of subscribers, then they aren't going to do it. Likewise with landline service, if the numbers don't support it, why run expensive fiber to an area where there might be only a few subscribers. No company is going to voluntarily do this, it doesn't make good business sense! As far as "flipping a switch" goes, that isn't the issue. The network Verizon sold to Fairpoint was functioning fine, the problems that everyone have been complaining about has to do with Fairpoint's Billing and Order systems. Physically, they can most likely provide services, but if they can't process an order for new or change of service, then it isn't going to happen. Verizon passed them massive amounts of customer data and Fairpoint contracted with a company to take that data and develop new Billing and Order systems. Apparently, they did a real lousy job. As far as I am concerned, this is all on Fairpoint and the poor choices and promises they have made.
Before the sale of Verizon's land lines to FairPoint the PUC was strongly advised not to approve the $2.4B sale. When the sale went through and was approved it did not include the sale of Verizon's systems, which neant that FairPoint had to build all the systems to manage and run the network from scratch. No wonder everything stopped working properly when the cut-over from Verizon's systems took place in February this year. The PUC behaved poorly and not in the interests of NH citizens.
Great job covering the Joint Status Conference on Thursday morning's show. One point that's missing in the discussion is that Verizon chose to sell to FairPoint in order to take advantage of a federal tax loophole called the Reverse Morris Trust. In other words, the selection of a buyer was limited to those that would qualify for this tax loophole and allow Verizon to take even more money out of the deal. So, we may never know it there were other potential buyers.
You bet there were other buyers. Verizon just sold off 14 more states in the midwest and small, less profitable sections of California. Verizon is at the heart of this problem. They created a relationship of mistrust with the PUC's in ME, NH, & VT by failing to maintain their copper infrastructure, shoddy record keeping that went on for years, and dumping it all on Fairpoint very dishonestly.