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CenturyLink wants to repeal a 1993 Idaho rule that requires phone companies to repair service outages within 24 hours or provide one month of service for customers at no charge.
The phone company is lobbying the state Public Utilities Commission to be exempted from the rule that its predecessor Qwest/US West lived under for nearly 20 years. (CenturyLink acquired Qwest.)
CenturyLink says consumers no longer need their phone lines repaired in such a short time, and the company says the rule in hurting their business.
A "temporary" phone cable installed along the top of a wire fence.
“Today, a substantial majority of basic local service customers are not cut off from communication and are not out-of-service in the event their wireline telephone is not working,” the company argued.
Besides, CenturyLink claims, wireless providers are not subject to the same rule, giving them an unfair competitive advantage.
CenturyLink already has a repair exemption for customers who experience service outages due to a natural disaster, during the weekend, or one caused by the customer’s own actions. But now the company wants more, telling the commission most people will simply switch to cell phones while their landline remains out of service.
Despite the apparent contradiction that delivering reduced service is better for consumers, the PUC has been negotiating a compromise, offering to eliminate the service credit requirement and extend the window for repairs to 48 hours.
Before they do, they might want to review CenturyLink’s performance in Arizona, where the company has been caught installing repaired phone lines in pavement cracks and atop public roadways.
The PUC staff questioned claims made by both CenturyLink and Frontier Communications, another phone company that supports the repeal of the repair rules.
“CenturyLink argues that a large percentage of customers now have access to wireless and broadband voice services,” the staff report says. “For CenturyLink’s legacy Qwest customers located in urban areas, this may be true. It may not be true for customers in the very rual parts of CenturyLink’s service territory. When wireline service fails, few, if any, alternative communication services are available in some rural areas.”
The PUC staff also argued the impact on small business in Idaho could be significant. Small businesses still rely overwhelmingly on traditional landline services to conduct business and process credit card payments. Prolonged outages could create significant economic harm for affected customers.
The commission is taking comments on the proposed settlement of Case # CEN-T-12-01 through May 31.
I love it — this article has NOTHING to do with caps, broadband or anything else related to “Promoting Better Broadband, Fighting Data Caps, Usage-Based Billing, & Other Internet Overcharging Schemes”.
No this article is plain old, unvarnished telco-bashing. Arguably in this case CenturyLink may deserve it, and as I’ve said elsewhere, you have the right to say and write whatever you want on your website.
But let’s not pretend this article is anything other than what it is: telco-bashing that has nothing to do with promoting your vision of unlimited flat-rate broadband.
You are evidently a new reader here. Service complaints, outages, and policy changes for TV, broadband, and phone service have all been covered here for years.
It’s all part of the same package, and in this case, it is mighty difficult to get “better broadband” from CenturyLink if your line is out of service.
I agree that a bad POTS line will be less likely to support DSL than a good POTS line.
I think there’s a quantifiable difference between “telco bashing” and factual reporting of events that show the telephone company in a bad light.
In think this article was the latter, not the former.
A phone company says having customers with working phones is a harmful business model? WTH?
If CenturyLink customers truly had reliable alternate telephone service they wouldn’t be CenturyLink customers in the first place and wouldn’t need alternate or backup cellular or broadband phone service.
CenturyLink is mediocrity at its finest…… I know, because I am in central Florida and have CenturyLink for my landline. Better hope they do not repeal that law gentleman; I have been without service for two days and my mother who lives with me is on a medical alert alarm system. Doesn’t matter, they have no paper work saying this number has priority status, so oh well! My mother has congestive heart failure and a host of other problems, so guess what? If I have to call an ambulance tonight, I have to walk outside and use my cell, which… Read more »
CenturyLink, which serves a lot of rural areas, has a lousy argument when they suggest people can just pull out a cell phone. If you’re in a rural area, cell phone service off a main highway or thoroughfare is going to be hit or miss, especially indoors. When relatively minor storms like Beryl plow through the southeast, the deteriorating landline network it encounters can quickly fall to pieces, which is exactly what happened last summer in the northeast when the remnants of Hurricane Irene (by that time a tropical storm) plowed into Delaware, NJ, Penn., N.Y., Mass., and northern New… Read more »
Barb if they don’t have the paperwork on file, maybe you’d be better served by refiling it. Don’t give them any room for excuses.