Circling…

While tens of thousands of customers in the southeastern United States might describe the quality of Windstream service as something to avoid stepping in, turkey buzzards are generating plenty of the real thing in Nebraska, creating two major headaches for the independent telecom company.

As of this afternoon, at least 30,000 Windstream customers in the southeast U.S. cannot make or receive long distance or toll-free calls without encountering a fast busy signal or an intercept recording. In case callers forget what a regular busy signal sounds like, one can be heard by dialing Windstream’s national customer support number, which is overwhelmed with complaint calls from annoyed customers.

“Windstream’s network operations and engineering teams are working a widespread outage affecting long-distance and toll-free call processing,” Windstream customer support acknowledged this afternoon. “This has also affected inbound calling to our support centers. An estimated time for restoral is not known.”

That is not good enough for Windstream customer Megan Short. Anyone calling her business number is likely to hear a Windstream recording telling callers: “The number you have reached is not in service, disconnected, or has been changed.”

“I am trying to run a business here, and this issue needs to be resolved ASAP,” she wrote on the company’s Facebook page. “This is your job, you know. You have ONE JOB.”

Other customers are complaining the outage is affecting local calls as well.

Veterinary Ophthalmology Services near Nashville is having a very quiet Monday with “few calls in or out, so it can’t be just long distance numbers. The majority of our clients are local.”

The employees of Don Meyler Inspections had plenty of free time to inspect the morning newspaper, afternoon lunch, and their frustration level, because the phones simply are not ringing in south Florida either.

“We’re severely impacted for inbound calls and outbound is sporadic,” the company writes on DownDetector.com. “It is the worst outage we’ve had in six years.”

Those tenacious enough to wait for customer support are not exactly getting total customer satisfaction:

“The big kicker was being on hold with the online chat for over an hour only to inform me there was ‘a high call volume’ and then the chat session ended,” said Chad Spaulding in Louisville, Ky. “You can’t even reach the corporate office for support. This is the fourth outage in our area in two months.”

With outages like this, some might thing the buzzards would be circling, and in Beatrice, Neb. they literally are, according to the Omaha Herald-World, fouling Windstream-provisioned Verizon Wireless cell towers where the federally protected birds favor building their nests.

Windstream’s John Dageford presented the company’s solution to the annual poo-problem from the birds: shoot them.

Dageford thinks if someone kills a handful of the large birds, the rest will flee in terror.

The Beatrice council reserved its decision on how to proceed for now, although a number of Windstream customers affected by today’s outage may not.

AT&T is seeking freedom from regulation, oversight and the right to abandon its landline network with the assistance of Connecticut legislators who modeled a state deregulation measure on recommendations from the corporate-funded, AT&T-backed, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

The legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee voted 20-4 to approve the bill, which would eliminate service and oversight requirements and allow the phone company to raise rates. AT&T has lost most of its landline customers since assuming control of service in Connecticut. Today, only 28 percent of homes in the state choose AT&T for their home phone service. The Office of Consumer Counsel suggests AT&T’s poor performance in the state may have had a lot to do with that, citing the company’s slow job of restoring phone service after a series of storms affected the state.

AT&T wants the power to drop telephone service altogether in areas considered unprofitable to repair or continue to serve. A trio of company-backed bills in the state legislature would hand them that right.

House Bills 6401, 6402 and Senate Bill 888 are all measures that would deregulate the phone company and open public lands for placing cell towers, limit regulator oversight and cut reporting requirements that let regulators track telephone rates.

None of the measures have been introduced on a whim, contend critics. The Connecticut Citizen Action Group released a report showing links between corporate-written model bills produced by ALEC and the current legislation before the Connecticut General Assembly.

HB 6401: House Bill 6401 strips the Public Utilities Review Authority (PURA) of their ability to regulate Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone services. An emerging market, this bill creates deregulation for the sake of deregulation.

HB 6402: House Bill 6402 eliminates the right of regulators to oversee AT&T to make sure it has some form of accountability to the public. The section on annual audits has been gutted, making it impossible to protect the public from rate-fixing. More importantly, it includes a provision to allow AT&T to end service to any customer it wants upon 30 days’ written notice.

SB 888: Senate Bill 888 has an ALEC-drafted provision that allows cell phone towers to be built on public lands on a presumption that the will of telecommunications companies is in the interest of the public good.

“If AT&T is allowed to drop service in unprofitable areas at their sole discretion, if they’re allowed to let service outages drag on for weeks with no consequences, if they’re allowed to jack up rates — of course they will,” Daniel Ravizza of Connecticut Citizen Action Group said in a statement. “‘Trust me’ is not a good enough guarantee for Connecticut consumers.”

ALEC and AT&T’s Legislative Chorus

• Rep. Debra Lee Hovey of Monroe and Newtown and Sen. Kevin Witkos of Simsbury, Avon, and Torrington serve as ALEC’s chair people for the state;
• Rep. John Piscopo is currently serving as ALEC’s National Chair;
• Rep. Lonnie Reed (D-Branford), chairwoman of the state legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee defended the measures saying they would give certainty to the telecom industry which would attract more investment in broadband and phone services. But she admitted once consumers learned of the proposed bills, things got heated quickly. “Some of this stuff is radioactive,” she told The Hartford Courant. “It’s hard even if you change the language to convince people otherwise;”
• “The arguments by opponents of HB 6402 have been shown to be without merit so now they’re resorting to desperate measures and innuendo,” said AT&T spokesman Chuck Coursey. “The fact is modernizing our telecom rules this year will help encourage private investment, job growth and consumer choice at a time when Connecticut needs it most;”
• John Emra is AT&T’s chief lobbyist in Connecticut. Emra was behind last year’s attempts to advance similar deregulation. Emra serves as the Executive Director of External Affairs for AT&T and as the chair of ALEC Connecticut.

“This is part of a national strategy by ALEC to advance a pro-corporate agenda at the expense of consumers,” James Browning, regional director of state operations for Common Cause, said in a statement. “We’ve seen the destructive impact these measures have had in other states. AT&T should not be allowed to get away with it here in Connecticut.”

The New Haven Register notes Browning said the three bills — SB888, HB6401 and HB6402 — closely resemble model legislation ALEC’s legislative template used in 20 other states where telecommunications regulatory overhaul has occurred. In 17 of those 20 states, telecommunications rates have increase, and in some cases, the cost of service has doubled.

Connecticut consumers can share their feelings about the bills through e-mail with their elected officials.

More than six months after Hurricane Sandy did her handiwork on coastal New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, hundreds of residents are still getting phone bills from Verizon for phone and Internet service they have been without since Halloween.

Most of the outages are around the Ocean Bay development in Far Rockaway, south of Brooklyn.

For thousands of residents, the only regular communication from Verizon every month arrives in the form of a bill.

“I need that phone to make phone calls for an ambulance or long distance or the police department,” Geraldine Jones, president of the development’s tenant association, told the Daily News. “We’re tired of being without our landlines. It’s terrible. They’ve got the nerve to send me a bill every month. I’m frustrated and angry. It’s not fair. It’s not right.”

WNYC Radio reports local politicians are now getting involved in Verizon’s half-year landline outages on Far Rockaway. (1 minute)
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Verizon’s response has mostly been shrugged shoulders and no firm estimate of when service will be repaired.

“Verizon is working closely with the New York City Housing Authority and together we have made good progress in restoring service to residents to of the Ocean Bay apartment complex,” company spokesman Phil Santoro retorted in a statement. “By the end of this month, we will begin restoring service to all those who live in the complex from 54th to 59th streets on our brand new state-of-the-art fiber optic network.”

But that means some of Verizon’s customers will have been without phone service for more than half a year.

“It shouldn’t take six months,” said City Councilman Donovan Richards. “Some of these people don’t have cell phones. They’re elderly. It’s a public safety issue.”

WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show takes a close look at telecom outages after Hurricane Sandy. (17 minutes)
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At least 11 percent of Time Warner Cable phone customers nationwide are into their second day without phone service due to an unspecified outage.

The problem began at around 3pm EDT on Sunday and temporarily knocked out Internet service in some areas for several minutes. The Internet service came back, but for many the phone service did not.

Time Warner Cable says calls may not be completed successfully and incoming calls may be blocked. Caller ID information has also proven spotty even for customers who still have service, and voicemail access is sporadic. Anecdotal reports from upstate New York residents received by Stop the Cap! report fast busy signals, no dial tone, or blinking lights on the company-supplied MTA.

Some customers regained service late Sunday night while others are slowly getting service restored today.

No automatic credits for interrupted phone service will be issued by Time Warner, but customers can use the company website’s contact form or call their local Time Warner Cable office for service credits.

Comcast’s eMTA backup battery. (Image: David Trebacz)

Comcast digital phone customers will no longer receive battery backup and monitoring service free of charge, according to a notification mailed to customers with their bills:

“Effective February 26, 2013, a battery backup and battery monitoring will no longer be provided free of charge. For existing XFINITY Voice customers with backup batteries, Comcast will continue to monitor your current battery at no charge; however, replacement batteries and their monitoring will no longer be provided free of charge. Backup batteries (which include monitoring) will be available for purchase.  Please call 1-888-972-1261 for pricing and details. XFINITY Voice uses the electrical power in your home. If you do not have a battery backup, you will not be able to use this service, including the ability to make emergency 911 calls, during an electrical power outage.”

Comcast customers leasing eMTA modems (which supply the cable company’s phone service) report that before the change batteries were included in the box. But not anymore, even though the packaging and accompanying literature still show the battery is included.

The lithium-ion battery keeps Comcast’s phone service working during power outages, but like other rechargeable batteries, it does eventually wear out. Now customers pay to replace them, even though the modem itself is leased to the customer.

Scott, a Comcast customer in Michigan, told Comcast he was unhappy with what seems like a petty cutback:

“I’m really miffed that they would now suddenly require customers to purchase a battery for a leased device,” Scott said.