Live Coverage of SaveOurNet.ca‘s National Open Internet Town Hall, netcasting from Toronto has now concluded.  Unfortunately, connectivity issues at the hotel plagued the live streaming event, and a good deal of it was not available on the live stream.  A recording of the presentation should be forthcoming shortly, and will be embedded in this space, when available.

“One customer may have to move his business [from New Hampshire] to Massachusetts because he can’t get [phone] service in his store.” — WMUR Manchester (3/13/09)

Third world phone service?  Now into spring, the saga of FairPoint continues with no end in sight.  Customer complaints achieve alarming proportions in all three New England states where FairPoint Communications assumed control of customers discarded by Verizon.

Across Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, local media present disturbingly similar stories of customers left weeks without service, unable to reach customer service representatives.  Palpable frustration over what seems to be an endless litany of excuses about why things have gone wrong, and how things are “getting better” start to ring hollow.

Now there is a new complication.  Questions about FairPoint’s financial health are now openly pondered by the media, as FairPoint asks for a three month delay in paying back its debt.  The Associated Press reports FairPoint is struggling.  Even before the transition problems erupted, the company lost 12% of its New England customers in 2008.  The Maine Public Utilities Commission received 1,200 complaints about the company and the company’s stock price was rapidly declining.

[flv width=”480″ height=”360″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WMUR Manchester Fairpoint Says Payment Delay Request Not Due To Customer Problems 3-13-09.flv[/flv]

Of course, no nightmare with a phone company is ever complete without them botching your bill.  FairPoint doesn’t disappoint, and as customers begin to receive their monthly statements from the new “transitioned” FairPoint, all too often they were wrong.  Customer payments were applied late or not at all, late fees charged even to customers on “autopay” plans, and new charges billed for lines that were disconnected.  Even customers on their way out the door were snared, as WMUR discovered from one Manchester resident who swore “I’ll never go back to FairPoint.”

Kate Bailey from the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission: “The level of service that FairPoint is providing to its customers is unacceptable right now.”

… Continue Reading

Thanks to Jay Ovittore and the City of Wilson, we have the video from the consideration of HB 1252, the horrible bill that would have made municipal broadband a virtual impossibility in the state of North Carolina.  Everyone who participated in our pushback should give themselves a pat on the back, because YOU helped make all the difference between broadband choice and advancement in the state vs. forcing communities into a broadband backwater.  Don’t believe for a second you just have to sit back and take what big telecom forces on you.  This shows you don’t!

This is what we can do — make the difference!

The NC Public Utilities Committee sends HB 1252 to a study committee. May 6, 2009.

The Time Warner protest in Greensboro attracted a lot of car honking approval, and even with a relatively small group of protestors, got significant coverage on local media.

“The fight for a flat rate.”  WXII reports regularly emphasize Time Warner has delayed, not withdrawn their tiered pricing experiment.  April 18, 2009

The protest against Time Warner in Rochester on April 18th attracted approximately 30 people, which was significant for an event many people assumed was canceled after Time Warner shelved their cap program temporarily 48 hours earlier.  But the point needed to be made that many people in our community don’t believe Time Warner has actually scrapped anything.  They’ll be back with the same kind of tiering program by the fall, trying to convince people that paying a lot more for the same thing is a good idea.