SubscribeFairPoint customers pay $25 fee to stop automatic payment withdrawals FairPoint failed to make, causing accounts to fall past due
By late March, those customers who had dial tones from their FairPoint lines began to grow concerned about the newest nightmare from the company that took over telephone service across three New England states. Billing problems began immediately after FairPoint converted to its own billing systems, and customers noticed.
The company explained it had a “loss of data” when their own billing system went online, and information from Verizon’s old billing system never made it to the new FairPoint system.
The result was loss of confidence in FairPoint, as customers grew increasingly concerned about inaccurate bills, lost payments, and as one New Hampshire couple discovered, the company’s inability to process “automatic payments” from customers on time, generating past due bills. Concerned about the impact late notices will have on their credit rating, they spend $25 to get their bank to stop automatic payments that FairPoint failed to make on time. WMUR reports:
http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WMUR Manchester Fairpoint Customers Report Problems With Phone Service 3-30-09.flvIn Vermont, customers frustrated with bills that never arrived wanted out. As one customer working in Saint Johnsbury discovered, there was no way to reach the company to tell them to cancel service. Vermont state regulators finally grew tired of FairPoint’s Public Relations excuses. They demanded evidence service was improving. WCAX reports:
http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCAX Burlington FairPoint Customer Wants Out 3-27-2009.flv
The New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission held an emotional hearing at the start of April, with some customers driving more than an hour to give regulators, and the president of FairPoint, a piece of their minds:
Other stories of interest:
- Special Report: The Lessons of FairPoint – A Tragedy in New England – Part Ten
- Special Report: The Lessons of FairPoint – A Tragedy in New England – Part Eight
- Special Report: The Lessons of FairPoint – A Tragedy in New England – Part Nine
- Special Report: The Lessons of FairPoint – A Tragedy in New England – Part Seven
- Special Report: The Lessons of FairPoint – A Tragedy in New England – Part Three
I have to ask. What does Fairpoints billing or service problems have to do with TWC caps. Ok a garage run provider was voted in and appoved but I do not see what this has to do with “Stop the Cap’s” mission. TW runs a tight ship and gets 99.99 percent of its billing right. Some times auto pay takes a cycle or two but you never get late letters and if you do a simple call and they take care of it. TW is very good except for a cap concept and I think most providers are going to pull the same thing anyway. What do they have to loose? No providers TOS papers will ever say! “we will never” Aint gona happen. BUT im still trying to figure what fairpoint has to do with this sites issues. Fairpoint has said nothing about caps but 11 forum topics make no sense. Am I missing something here, except for Fairpoint bad service I don’t see a connection. It is a waste of server data transer costs.
Ken, we went through this before. This site is not just about Time Warner and their caps. Phil writes about FairPoint very smartly, because whole cap scam fits like a puzzle piece into what is wrong with telecommunications in this country. They would never have tried to cap people in your city if they didn’t feel they could get away with it. You are in Rochester right? Your phoneco Frontier is about to do what FairPoint did here. They are going to add 7 million Verizon people to a 3 million people phoneco. You don’t think Rochester is going to be ignored while Frontier adds the 7 million and tries to make the Verizon system work with theirs?
Frontier has a 5GB acceptable use policy on their Internet. That policy is now going into effect for 7 million more people. Those people were thinking they would get fiber optics from Verizon and now they are getting DSL with a 5GB use policy on it. Rochester gets no fiber because Frontier is occupied elsewhere spending a lot of money on buying up other people. And everyone gets lousy service.
Time Warner can cap you guys with no risk because you can’t go anywhere else for Internet. They can’t do that in other NY cities where fiber is being installed.
For me in Vermont, assuming I get my bill and have a phone line, I am stuck with 1.5mb DSL for the rest of forever because FairPoint is nearly bankrupt. They are sure not going to install fiber here. If I lived 1/2 mile up the street I could get cable but I am too far out and they want to charge me $9000 to install a line down here.
FairPoint DSL is terrible too. Outages all the time, no e-mail for days, and they never answer their phone. They have a thing where it will say enter your number and we will call you back and they NEVER do. I got my own e-mail account with Gmail so I can stop relying on FairPoint, but if the service is down for two days that is no help.
You just know FairPoint will cap too if they can.
This is unacceptable, and we need a big change in this country to stop phone service from falling apart and stopping caps from ever getting started. It’s all part of the same big problem.
The seven million should be around the total number of Frontier customers after the merger, including the existing Frontier and the legacy Verizon customers. The larger point of concern about how well Frontier will integrate everyone together is valid, however.
This topic should be dropped until such a time it matches STC’s mission. I would be more interested hearing about the forum topic that was going to list people we should thank for doing something that was never spelled out. Did it die on the vine?
Well, a resident of one of the three states affected by this issue, I appreciate someone taking the time to do an in-depth study of the issue. It seems to me that STC’s mission could be generalized as protecting the interest of ISP customers, and right now there is no greater abuse being acted against customers in the US than the total failure of FairPoint.
Burlington, Vermont is our biggest city and 2 days ago there was a 9 hour internet outage affecting all customers out of the Burlington and South Burlington COs as well as a random handfull of other COs across in the state. This took the real estate company I do tech for offline from 1:20pm until end of business (I saw in the logs that it eventually came back up at 10:20pm.)
Last week, Verizon cut the link to their DNS servers. FairPoint only bothered to tell users with static IPs, and as a result anyone with any sort of technical prowess using static DNS settings (such as in our Firewall/DNS caching server) lost connectivity without any obvious clue as to why.
This stuff has been going on all year, and we’re in a monopolistic environment where there are is no alternative for running some of these services. Even if we wanted to move to Level 3 or one of the other huge nationals, we’d be looking at 10 times the cost and having the last leg of the connection still carried incompetently by FP. South Burlington’s fire, police, and town offices were reduced to 2 working phone lines to share amongst themselves for 6 hours earlier this week because of such an issue – their service is through Level 3, but FP screwed up the hand off.
All this stuff has been covered by the news – hunt it down with Google if you like. If it helps you reconcile the site mission, consider service as it stands right now as unlimited, but with randomly appearing rolling daily caps of 0 bytes.
Dan is absolutely right. The Fairpoint debacle highlights the limitations of corporations to execute their mission and the limitations of government to force the corporations to do the right thing.
And the role of government is germane to the capping issue because if we all noticed, TWC did not back off on caps until Senator Schumer got involved.
Hey, it’s quite simple – altho we appeared to have forgotten this in the last century – “natural monopolies” require government oversight. Just as the PSC worked for decades for electrical and landline phone service. Government oversight will have to work for cable since TWC and others have achieved a monopoly/duopoly – natural or not – in much of the country.
Jeff: TWC did not back off on caps… It backed off on test tubes. So were just are not a test tube any longer. Nothing was ever said about the future from that day forward. TW found out telling the public ahead of time and use meters was not in their best intrest. So their orginal plan were changes in the fall, has that changed? I doubt it. Were not a test tube any longer but they can still change their plans and Schumer does not have the power to stop it alone. I think maybe you read a little more into that story then what was actually said or done that day. And being the good little New Yorker he is it was done behind a closed door as usual so no one had a clue what was going on. As I remember Phil was over the moon happy until he got home and found out a bucket of cold water was dumped on the day. Im not knocking the guy for trying but he just does not have the power to control the internet. Actually TW did not even have to agree to see him then what could he do… nothing but it looked good for both sides on TV. I hoping they don’t cap but the rule changes are going to have to come from DC and congress and signed into law that is the only way. One of our Texas friends said he has TW and ATT and both are playing with caps so he now has nowhere to run.
Cindy and Dan. I just read this sites mission statement. While there are a few general statments that could be read one way or the other the site mission is CAPS. You can view it up top in the “about us” button. Im sorry about all the people that are affected by Fairpoint and the only people you can point fingers at are the leaders of your states that allowed it. Maybe nobody else wanted it so they took the first thing that came along. Frontier should go a little better. They have been in the game for awhile and are not ready to go bust at any moment. Remember 5 Gig is what TW wants to give people to so that is a wash.
What is general about this:
“We support robust competition in the broadband marketplace, to bring as many service providers as possible into every community. Where competition is woefully inadequate or does not exist, we support reasonable regulation to prevent providers from only wiring selected neighborhoods, charging confiscatory rates, imposing unreasonable limitations and caps, and providing inadequate service. We also support local communities having the right to consider and construct municipally-owned and/or operated broadband facilities to meet the needs of their citizens and businesses. No community should be forced into a broadband backwater at the behest of a monopoly/duopoly commercial provider(s) which refuse(s) to upgrade service.
Consumer protection and pro-consumer actions are a primary focus of this site. ”
1. Verizon would not wire three states for fiber so they dumped the company. They didn’t just skip neighborhoods, they skipped half of New England.
2. FairPoint will not wire anyone with fiber that didn’t already have it on the way.
3. Nobody can deny FairPoint provides inadequate service.
4. Some towns are talking about their own municipal networks to get around FairPoint.
5. New England is in serious peril of being in a “broadband backwater” when they are stuck with 1-3Mbps DSL service for God knows who long.
6. Why should any cable company ever feel the need to upgrade again when FairPoint is the competition.
7. This is the first website I have found that is about informing consumers about FairPoint and helping to expose the sordid history. That sounds like pro-consumer action to me.
Ken, if YOU are not interested in this issue, skip past the stories about it and read something else. There is always something on here to read. We do care. TW is not doing anything this second on caps and I’m sure if they do we’ll read about it here. Meantime, if you want a big army of people to fight this issue it is a good idea to talk to people beyond the five cities Time Warner victimized for two weeks in April. You’ll need us if someone introduces legislation or needs a policy enforced. Everyone is in this together.
I think people have to look at this entire site as the consumer version of Re-Education. People need to realize meters and caps and bad service do not happen in a vacuum. They happen because companies have been so deregulated and their investors are hungry for the same high returns they are used to. Management has to cut costs and look for new revenue all the time. I am in Maine and I have FairPoint for telephone service and Time Warner Cable for cable service.
We couldn’t believe it when Verizon pulled out of our state. They (as well as under other names) have served Maine since the original Bell System was set up. But stock people on Wall Street want more and better returns and people are dropping regular phone service.
So Verizon had to say whether it was worth spending money here to bring fiber service and offer competition to TW and they decided it was not. The time it would take to wait for profit to come back was too long. So they left. They also left us with FairPoint, and the greed was plain when they found this tiny North Carolina phone company. Thats because the deal went through tax free for Verizon, because of this small company’s size. More money for investors. Rotten service for us.
My wife’s brother got a $450 FairPoint bill because they charged him almost ten times for one phone line on one bill. He still hasn’t gotten credits and now that FairPoint is sending out collection actions, now he’s going to be hassled by those snakes.
FairPoint doesn’t want to spend the money. Their stock is in the tank and now they may go bankrupt. And who will force them to pull the plug? Angry stockholders.
TW has to settle for big fat profits instead of huge profits, so they cut their costs and then complain their network they haven’t kept up with is too small, so they have to charge people extra and limit their use to spend on a better network. Horsefeathers. They just want to show a better return for Wall Street.
It’s all the same big issue. Nobody cares if companies want to compete one another and play around with pricing when people have lots of good choices. This is basic telephone and Internet service we are discussing now. Those are not options. They are necessities these days. We cannot let monopoly pricing and policies destroy either.
This whole thing is not about one tree in a forest. This is about the whole forest. Step back and see the big picture.
Well, I thank Phil for taking the time to cover this issue. If you have such problems with the mission statement, perhaps you should suggest a rewrite to encompass what is obviously a subject of importance to the founder/editor.
Dan I don’t have a problem with mission statements. Actually no intrest at all with them. All I did is ask a question and got some answers.