This series comes at a time when another independent telephone company, Frontier Communications, is trying to take on millions of Verizon customers also being shed for business purposes.  The lessons learned from this cautionary tale regarding FairPoint should be taken to heart by affected customers, local communities, and regulatory authorities to make sure any transaction benefits customers more than the balance sheets of the companies involved.  Mistakes were made, too much trust was given, and as readers will come to understand, unacceptable customer nightmares over bad service are still a problem today.

This is a good point to summarize where we’ve come in this series over the last week or two.  Verizon customers in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont awoke one day to discover that Verizon had decided they were no longer worth the trouble to service, and sold their business to an independent upstart telephone company from North Carolina, FairPoint Communications.  It was a concerning prospect, because FairPoint was a relatively tiny telephone company serving only a few hundred thousand customers in rural communities here and there.  Now they were taking on the telephone needs of three New England states.  Plenty of concern was raised about whether FairPoint had bitten off more than it could chew.

After much contention, a deal was hammered out between state regulators and the company to approve the sale, as long as the company kept its promise to expand broadband offerings, clean up some of Verizon’s sloppy practices (particularly the ‘double pole’ problem where replacement telephone poles were erected that Verizon never used), and that FairPoint had enough funding available to cover its debt load from the transaction through any economic downturns, which turned out to be particularly relevant considering where our economy has gone in the last 10 months.

Throughout 2008, the company was expected to make the final transition from Verizon to FairPoint by fall.  A lot of speed bumps hampered their progress, including major failures of the emergency 911 system in Maine in spring and summer of that year, resulting in a $25,000 fine.  By late June, a consulting group hired to monitor the transfer reported that FairPoint had not yet adequately prepared for the transition, lacked sufficient staff, and recommended delaying the transfer.  FairPoint announced in late June the original scheduled target date of September was being pushed back to November.  Then, in mid-September, the company was back with a second delay announcement, now pushing the transition from November to January 2009.  FairPoint blamed concerns about staff training and that “data transfer and testing be done properly.”

We pick up the story in January, when customers learned that FairPoint’s culmination of its year-long adventure to finalize the transition would mean a “blackout in service,” a delay for a minimum of two weeks before the company would process service calls, new installations, or make other changes to customer accounts.  FairPoint’s unprecedented announcement would mean a backlog of calls that could bring about delays of “30-45 days” before service requests would be answered, as WCAX in Burlington warned on January 15th:

Customers weren’t happy one bit.  Despite rosy scenarios and downplaying the impact of this event by Vermont Public Service Commissioner Dave O’Brien, many residents depend on their telephone service, particularly for those with health-challenged family members.  Over in Maine, WCSH covered the story of one woman who was forced to rely on her cell phone in a rural area while she waited, and she has a son with severe asthma:

Tomorrow: The anger level rises to the temperature of a red hot poker, as FairPoint not only drops the ball, it loses it.