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:
[flv width=”480″ height=”360″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WMUR Manchester Fairpoint Customers Report Problems With Phone Service 3-30-09.flv[/flv]
In 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:
[flv width=”368″ height=”208″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCAX Burlington FairPoint Customer Wants Out 3-27-2009.flv[/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:
[flv width=”480″ height=”360″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WMUR Manchester FairPoint Promises Service Improvements 04-03-09.flv[/flv]
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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)… Read more »
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… Read more »
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.