The spark that lit the inferno of customer rage against FairPoint

The Day the Wheels Officially Came Off.  Saturday, January 31, 2009 was Transition Day for FairPoint, finally making the long-delayed switch from Verizon to their own systems.  It was the equivalent of leaving a pile of ‘oily rags’ next to those overloaded electrical circuit breaker boxes in The Towering Inferno.  Only it was the customers who were on fire.  Must-see videos to follow!

“Asinine.”  That’s how one FairPoint customer summed up FairPoint’s transition to its own systems and finally cutting the last ties to Verizon.  Because when the last ties were cut, so went her Internet access… for days on end.  Company representatives wished her “good luck” talking to Technical Services, because they couldn’t even find her account.  She wasn’t alone.  Tens of thousands of customers across three states were left hanging out to dry when FairPoint’s transition and support services collapsed, leaving customers with no answers, busy signals, and online chat customer support queues that literally took hours to reach the front of the line, if you made it at all.  WMUR in Manchester, New Hampshire brought cameras into FairPoint and challenged company officials to use their own support systems to get answers.  On camera, the company official discovered she had managed, over the course of more than a dozen minutes, to finally achieve #516 in the online support queue.

[flv width=”480″ height=”360″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WMUR Manchester FairPoint Says It’s Bringing In More Help 2-3-09.flv[/flv]

It wasn’t pretty over in Barre, Vermont either, where WCAX picks up the story of one businessman who not only lost his e-mail access, but all of his e-mail dating back weeks.  FairPoint claimed it was working “around the clock” to fix the problems they spent an extra half-year preparing for.  Patience is a virtue with FairPoint, because this customer was asked to wait for “one minute” for assistance, and was still waiting six hours later:

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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:

[flv width=”368″ height=”208″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCAX Burlington FairPoint Installations On Hold 1-15-09.flv[/flv]

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:

[flv width=”480″ height=”360″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCSH Portland FairPoint Tells Customers to Wait Up to 6 Weeks for Service 01-21-09.flv[/flv]

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

911 Nightmare! After the ink was dry on the approval to transfer Verizon customers to FairPoint Communications, and the transition had begun, the foreshadowing of problems started in the late spring of 2008 when Maine experienced several 911 system crashes and outages, putting safety at risk for citizens whose urgent pleas for help went unanswered for hours at a time.

WMTW in Portland led the newscast on May 19th with the latest developments:

Promises, promises.  The one thing you can always count on with mergers and acquisitions: the promise what they’ll bring you tomorrow is better than what you have today, but only if you approve the deal.  The concept of forward momentum from change is very compelling when it comes to technology.  The lesson people have to learn is that not all change is good, and not all promises are always kept.  For New Englanders drawn into the transfer of their telephone service from Verizon to FairPoint Communications, the allure of faster broadband certainly sounded good, with promises made in July 2008 that 75% of Vermont would have access to FairPoint DSL service by the end of that year.

[flv width=”320″ height=”240″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WPTZ Fairpoint Announces Huge Expansion 9-30-08.flv[/flv]

This report, aired on September 30, 2008 on WPTZ Plattsburgh (viewable in Vermont) also displayed a company-made sign promising that 100% of Vermont would have broadband service available from FairPoint by 2010.  But the numbers were already in dispute when another station serving Vermont, WCAX in Burlington, reported that same day that just 80% of customers would have access by that time:

[flv width=”368″ height=”208″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCAX Burlington FairPoint Promises Internet Expansions 9-30-08.flv[/flv]

Why the discrepancy?  After all, the visual material on display at the town hall meeting covered by both stations clearly showed a map claiming 100% coverage.

With the benefit of time, the answer turns out to be that promises made by one company official were not always repeated by others.  Indeed, FairPoint has a history of tempering enthusiasm.  Enthusiasm that sometimes originated from the company itself.

Watch in amazement as the numbers drop and the excuses mount.  As the Bennington Banner quoted a FairPoint spokesman in 2008, the numbers and scope of the actual rollout was considerably smaller than the sweeping improvements being promised:

“By 2010, we hope to have at least 80 percent of households in the state with DSL access,” Fastiggi said. “We hope to have every customer in half of our exchanges to have access by 2010 as well.” According to Fastiggi, though, the expansion does not mean that every house in these towns will receive access to the service. “We’re doing certain areas in each town — nothing we’re doing encompasses the entire town,” Fastiggi said. “I don’t want to say we’re expanding bit by bit, but we are moving neighborhood by neighborhood.“

New Englanders, at the time of these announcements, were hopeful, but skeptical whether or not the company would meet its goals.  They were right to be.

As for those wireless connections promised to the most rural areas of the state, the company did sign a contract with Nortel Networks and Airspan Networks to construct a network based on the aging fixed wireless 802.16d standard. Known as “fixed WiMAX,” the technology is largely being abandoned by many providers in favor of the newer mobile WiMAX standard IEEE 802.16e, which has a lot more bells and whistles.  But the technology FairPoint wants to deploy will function for a basic wireless fixed “broadband” service, albeit a comparatively slow one, operating at 1-3Mbps.

So how is the company doing with its DSL “improvements?”  Not so good.  Since these announcements, the company has fallen behind schedule on virtually everything, and was one of the few providers to actually lose broadband DSL customers during the second half of 2008 as many switched to another provider or simply gave up.  They are set to lose MANY more in 2009, for reasons that will become obvious soon enough.

In yesterday’s story, FairPoint Communications learned that the state utility commissions in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, were underwhelmed by their proposal to take control of telephone service formerly provided by Verizon.  The regulatory authorities in all three states felt state residents would bear most of the risk, and too few rewards in return for approving the deal.  New Hampshire was among the most skeptical.

[flv width=”320″ height=”240″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WMUR Manchester FairPoint and Verizon Plan to Refile Proposal 12-21-07.flv[/flv]

Vermont wasn’t overwhelmed with what it saw either:

[flv width=”320″ height=”240″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCAX Burlington FairPoint’s New Plan.flv[/flv]

But FairPoint returned to the negotiating table to make additional promises and concessions.  But would they ultimately keep them?

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