Even as Patrick Drahi’s Altice promises state regulators expensive upgrades and better service for Cablevision subscribers in return for permission to buy the cable operator, complaints from Altice customers in France are now achieving an unprecedented high, with French media reports implicating Drahi’s demands for severe cost cutting in disastrous consequences for customers that face service outages that can last weeks.

SFR, one of France’s largest telecom service providers, has been the subject of ongoing media attention across France as customers continue to complain about promised network improvements that have ground to a halt, deteriorating infrastructure and service outages, poor customer service, and what French telecom experts claim is a clear case of cost-cutting being given precedence over good service.

Rarely has a company executive charged with putting a company’s case to the media and the public had a more difficult time explaining away the thousands of complaints that media outlets receive when they ask readers and viewers to comment about Altice-owned companies.

Salvatore Tuttolomondo, a regional director of relations for SFR, could only muster, “For now, we are not very good, but we are not bad,” in defense.

The French Association of Telecom Users (AFUTT) reports complaints about what is now one of the worst-performing telecom providers in France have exploded. SFR has seen a doubling of complaints from its wired customers between 2014 and 2015 and complaints about wireless service are also up by 50%.

“Even Free.fr and MVNOs do better,” says Denis Leboeuf, from the AFUTT.

For many French consumers, Altice teaches the lesson of bewaring promises of vast service improvements from an executive with a well-known demand to cut costs to the bone.

Capital reports the reason for SFR’s troubles is easy to identify.

“To restore margins, the operator has sacrificed the quality of its network and its customer service,” the magazine reports.

Capital lays out an indictment of Drahi’s way of doing business, one that has occasionally left his customers in peril when they were unable to summon emergency assistance over failing telephone lines or ruined one town’s tourist season when service problems made it difficult to impossible for visitors to register for events and arrange bookings.

It was never supposed to happen this way. On April 7, 2014, a triumphant Patrick Drahi announced his company Altice trumped rivals like Bouygues Telecom to acquire SFR from French conglomerate Vivendi for about $17 billion dollars. The first thing Mr. Drahi promised was to invest heavily in SFR to improve network quality and cut unnecessary costs. Those promises are now familiar to Cablevision subscribers as regulators in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey contemplate approving the sale of the cable company to Altice.

Much of France is still waiting for those promised upgrades. SFR’s DSL equipment is ‘downright lousy,’ delivering dead last performance among French telecom operators. SFR wireless data is no prize either, with customers howling complaints about slow to unresponsive service. Even texting over SFR’s network is dreadful, reports La Voix du Nord: “Carrier pigeons are faster,” it reported. Widespread complaints of texting failures lasting hours are legion. Customers know when service is restored when the dozens of unanswered texts they didn’t receive during the business day suddenly arrive in the middle of the night.

One nurse discovered her best bet is to go and stand near her toilet, where cell reception is just good enough to roam on a cell network operating across the border in Belgium. Other customers have to go outside to find a signal, because many of SFR’s cell towers are often affected by service interruptions which can last weeks.

Several French cities were the unlucky recipients of SFR service outages in December. Parts of Pas-de-Calais had the displeasure of being “cut off from the world” by a complete service outage lasting 15 days. French businesses sent employees to coffee shops and other venues during the business day with their cell phones to find a wireless signal to conduct business for more than two weeks.

La Voix du Nord confirmed one subscriber’s account that The Grand Wireless Failure of 2015 in Desvres came as a result of an antenna that fell into disrepair. The problem was identified in the first week of December, but an employee-engineer brusquely admitted “maintenance [to restore service] will not take place before Wednesday, Dec. 16” — at least two weeks later. Whether the repair could be completed quickly or not made no difference. Cost controls at SFR controlled the calendar.

French telecom watchdog ARCEP has learned to take Altice’s promises and commitments with a grain of salt. It suggested the “gap between promises and reality” had grown into a chasm over SFR’s appallingly awful 3G service. Altice replied it was “undertaking a major renovation program of its mobile network that is not without impact on service quality, but it is an investment for the next 15 years.”

More than a few customers wonder if that means it will take 15 years to get reasonable service. More than 1.6 million so far have decided not to wait and find out.

Laurence joined the exodus of customers canceling service this month. Many customers leave angry, such as the parade of residents from the “digital eco-district” of Issy-les-Moulineaux who are “exasperated by repeated failures” of SFR’s wired broadband and television service equipment. Of the 40 days Laurence was a customer, he lacked Internet service for 17 of them.

Altice officials call the horror stories anecdotal and note they have millions of happy customers. But La Voix du Nord isn’t so certain that is true either. (They are also an SFR customer suffering service problems.) Since Drahi took over as the new owner, the newspaper surveyed its readers starting in March 2015 for their thoughts about Altice-owned SFR. In less than 24 hours, their Facebook page melted down with 3,760 mostly critical responses. Orange, the cell phone company the French usually love to hate, skated by with ten times fewer complaints than SFR. Altice officials promised things were about to get much better in response.

Slightly.

Last fall, the newspaper repeated the survey and 2,700 comments and replies arrived, again overwhelmingly negative. More than 100 customers were so angry, they wanted to share details of their service tragedies in private messages. The reader service representative eventually had to ask people to stop, saying she had at least 100 more unread in her inbox.

Customers were promised upgrades before. Thomas Detrain of Nœux-les-Mines received word he should expect one disruption lasting three weeks back in November 2014. Since that time, the outages keep on coming and SFR has offered him one time compensation of approximately $44 on one bill amounting to about $52. SFR now expects to be paid in full, whether the service is working or not.

Charlotte Dabrowski of Bourbourg has had her problems with service quality, too. But at least she has some service. “What makes me the most pissed off is that I was told: ‘You’re lucky, you are on the right side of our antenna.’ Was this supposed to be funny?”

SFR has resolved to either downplay its legendary bad press or blame someone else for all the troubles.

Tuttolomondo attempts the former, dismissing the thousands of Facebook complaints the newspaper had received.

“You have how many comments from dissatisfied customers, 2,000?,” Tuttolomondo asked. “We have about 500,000 customers in the region, so this is less than 0.5%.”

When asked if SFR would automatically compensate customers for its significant service outages, Tuttolomondo implied his customers would take advantage of him if he tried.

“It’s case by case,” said Tuttolomondo. “I’m not going to promise a general compensation, otherwise even customers who do not have to worry will ask me for money. But our customer service is really alert. You think it makes me happy to have unhappy customers? We’ll never get 100% satisfied.”

Tuttolomondo also seemed exasperated with his own customers, implying the company’s poorly rated 4G service “sometimes comes from incompatible phones” owned by customers who didn’t know better.

Tuttolomondo’s line matches that of SFR’s customer service representatives, now relocated to call centers sprinkled across the exotic North African desert lands of the Maghreb, where workers with passable French language skills are willing to work cheap. But not cheap enough. Recently Drahi has been looking for an even better deal from subcontractors in Portugal, Mauritius and Madagascar. Customers lament it will probably be difficult to get a call center employee living with a few hours of electricity a day and no telephone service at home to comprehend why SFR’s fiber to the home service is not meeting its broadband speed objectives.

Drahi yes-man Jerome Yomtov, the Deputy Secretary General of SFR, decided it would be more productive to blame someone else for everything — Vivendi, the former owner, in particular.

“For our 3G and 4G networks, we pay the price of under-investment from the previous [owner],” explains Yomtov. He added the sale disrupted upgrades for two years. SFR had reduced its investments by 10% after it knew it was going to be put up for sale. But Capital reports after Drahi arrived, investments froze almost completely, which caused ever-increasing delays for network repairs and upgrades to keep up with traffic demands, not to mention commissioning new cell sites to improve coverage.

The reason for the delay was a Drahi-inspired Lord of the Flies-style bidding war among vendors and subcontractors.

“The new management has replaced our usual subcontractor bidding process with that used by Numericable [another Drahi-owned company],” a network technician tells Capital. The result was endlessly repeated bidding rounds as subcontractors tried to undercut each other to win Drahi’s business. The technician reports Drahi allowed the bidding to run up to four months, resulting in one of the last rounds to scrape together a bid offering savings of just 5,000 Euros (just over $5,000) over a previous round.

“Drahi wanted to see how far they would be willing to come down,” the technician said. “The standoff would have [eventually] enabled SFR to save 10-15% of its infrastructure costs.” In the end, the priority given to cost-savings (at the cost of deteriorating service) caused a stagnancy of upgrades lasting almost nine months, claimed one project manager.

ARCEP revealed that SFR now has France’s smallest high-speed 4G network, with only 39% of the population covered. SFR officially claims 65% coverage, but that difference comes largely from coverage rented from competing Bouygues Telecom. Over the first 11 months of 2015, Altice’s subsidiary has managed to launch only 962 new antennas, three times less than the notoriously cheap Free.fr.

More stories of Altice’s so-called “Cost-Killing Madmen” — the company’s bean counters sent in after Drahi closes on a deal — have also since emerged. Employees tell the French press their cost-cutting schemes are bizarre and ruthless. Employees in one office were suddenly given orders to discard the office’s plants strategically placed to help improve the working environment.

“They told us it’s that or the toilet paper,” sighed the employee. Many thought the cost-cutters were joking at first, until they remained stone-faced during the nervous laughter shared by employees.

At the headquarters of La Plaine Saint-Denis, visitors may notice things are looking a little worse for wear in the office. That may be because the carpet is no longer cleaned weekly. The bean counters think once every two weeks is enough. But the toughest conditions are now probably experienced by the janitorial staff, who have been ordered to clean and maintain 46 office restrooms and given only three hours each work cycle to complete the task. At least 700 workers in Lyon were denied doctor visits for several days when the cost-cutters decided medical expenses were too high. It took the Works Council a few angry moments with company executives to rescind that budget cut.

Despite the plight of the workers, Drahi has some headaches of his own. He is hard at work conquering the most exclusive neighborhood in Geneva, Switzerland. Drahi, who boasts about his cost cutting and his ability to pay minimal wages, has splurged on two enormous villas in the commune of Cologny. His deputies and financial partners are not far away, having spent small fortunes on expensive housing in Vésenaz and Prangins. Now one of Drahi’s protegés, Jean-Luc Berrebi, member of the board and chief financial officer at Altice-owned Israeli telecom company HOT, has strategically moved himself right next door to Drahi, spending nearly $28 million dollars to buy Drahi’s second villa just 100 meters away. At the same time Drahi was closing on that deal, ordinary Israelis are shelling out considerably more for service from HOT, after the company announced sweeping rate hikes.

Investors initially seemed pleased to learn cost cutting and reduced investment helped SFR increase its margin 18% since the beginning of 2015, which has allowed the company to deliver some impressive results to shareholders, at least in the short-term. But that good news was tempered by the veritable stampede of customers fleeing SFR for better service from other providers. Many in the French media now question whether Drahi has not just damaged SFR’s service, but also permanently tainted the image of its brand.

Executives at Orange can sigh some relief watching the chaos unfold at SFR and Numericable. Customers that swore off Orange with protestations of “never again,” are now increasingly calling the perennial bad boy of wireless “the lesser evil.”

Time Warner Cable customers should not have to pay for service when an outage makes it unavailable, but like most cable and phone companies you will not get a service credit without asking.

Stop the Cap! decided to test Time Warner Cable’s responsiveness to a request for two recent outages — one widespread and one local:

Cyber Monday Slowdown: Although Time Warner Cable claimed an outage on Nov. 30 only affected a few thousand customers, evidence from websites like Down Detector found the cable operator’s broadband service slowing to a crawl early Monday morning after midnight eastern time, eventually failing completely for some overnight. Problems multiplied on Monday afternoon in the midwest, particularly in states like Ohio and Kentucky where Internet service was disrupted on one of the busiest online shopping days of the year.

Western NY Football Sunday Fadeout: In western New York, Time Warner Cable’s service collapsed right in the middle of Sunday’s Buffalo Bills game against the Houston Texans. Messing with a televised football game approaches a criminal offense in many communities across the country, and angry fans burned up Time Warner’s phone lines with complaints about the service outage, which took out television service for about an hour, particularly in Rochester.

Neither interruption will result in automatic rebates to affected customers. Instead, Time Warner will grant a service credit of one day of service for each reported outage when customers ask.

The quickest way we found to snare credits (which turned out to amount to $8.16 for us — hardly an insignificant amount) was to use Time Warner’s online chat system.

Here’s how:

1. Login to your account at: https://myservices.timewarnercable.com/
2. Look for the Chat button on the right side of your screen and select it
3. What we wrote: “We are writing to request service credits for the service outages on Nov. 30 and Dec. 6.”
4. What they wrote: “I have applied credit on your account for two days of $8.16. It will be reflected in your next bill.”

The entire process from start to finish took just over five minutes.

The best way Frontier Communications believes it can resolve service problems in Pennsylvania is to threaten those complaining with a cease and desist letter that accuses the complainant of misrepresenting Frontier’s excellent service.

Bradford County, Pa. officials learned this first hand when Commissioner Darryl Miller wrote to Frontier alerting them that service outages in northeastern Pennsylvania are becoming a public safety issue. The company responded with a letter warning the commissioner to end the criticism or else.

“We’re simply looking for answers,” Commissioner Miller told WNEP-TV’s investigations reporter Dave Bohman. Miller adds he thinks it’s heavy-handed to use the words, “cease and desist.”

Miller isn’t the only one looking for answers. WNEP interviewed Susan Moore, who lives alone in the rural community of Orwell. Her phone service went out of service at least once a week over the summer.

“I’ve got a lot of health issues,” she told the TV station. The implications of not having landline service became all too clear to Moore in August when she needed to send for an ambulance.

Moore pressed her lifeline call alert button which relies on Frontier phone service to reach medical aid in case she falls and cannot get up or has a medical emergency. Nothing happened. Her phone service was out again.

“Without the phone service, my Life Alert doesn’t work,” Moore said. “That’s when I decided, as much pain as I was in, I got in a car and drove 20 miles to get to a hospital.”

Bradford County officials hear stories like Moore’s so often, they now eclipse complaints about potholes and taxes.

The problems affect both traditional landline dial tone service and DSL. If outages are not the subject of the complaint, slow and unresponsive Internet access usually is. Some customers were told Frontier oversold its DSL service in Bradford County and the company is waiting for federal broadband subsidies to improve service in the area.

Frontier Communications vice president Elena Kilpatrick said Frontier will spend part of a $2 million broadband improvement subsidy to deliver better service in Bradford County over the next six years. At the same time Frontier is tapping a ratepayer-funded subsidy to improve its existing service, the company is spending $10.5 billion of its own money to acquire Verizon landline infrastructure and customers in Florida, Texas, and California.

Despite the fact it will take up to six years to fully spend the subsidy, Kilpatrick claims the company has already upgraded phone and Internet service and fixed several problems reported by customers. She defended the company’s use of a threatening “cease and desist” letter sent to Commissioner Miller, claiming Frontier wanted the “misrepresentation of the facts” to stop.

Despite Kilpatrick’s claims, the complaints keep rolling in.

Randy, a Frontier customer in Bradford County reports he endures Frontier outages just about every Saturday since October, despite repeated service calls. Janise Groover wrote a Frontier technician tried to blame cobwebs for interfering with her Wi-Fi signals and poor DSL speeds — problems that are still unresolved — for which she pays Frontier $103 a month. Janice Bellinger complained her Frontier DSL connection drops “three or four times a day.” Customers in Monroe, Luzerne and Sullivan counties echoed Frontier service is dreadful in their areas as well.

Customers experiencing problems with their phone service in Pennsylvania can file an informal complaint with the state Public Utilities Commission and the FCC.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WNEP Scranton Frontier Service Problems 11-16-15.mp4[/flv]

WNEP in Scranton reports Frontier’s solution to a county commissioner’s complaints about service was to send him a “cease and desist” letter. (3:16)

A Frontier Communications service outage in New York left more than 6,000 customers without Internet service for more than 24 hours, leaving businesses with no way to process credit card payments and idling home-based telecommuters.

The outage began early Sunday morning leaving customers near Buffalo, Rochester, and the Southern Tier with no broadband and no answers.

Daniel Virella of Irondequoit called Frontier about the outage and a representative spent 30 minutes troubleshooting his connection with no results.

“I [then] asked him if there was an outage and he says, ‘you know what you’re right,” Virella wrote. “I’m like ‘are you serious?'”

As calls poured into Frontier’s customer service center, nobody had any answers about what the problem was or when it would be fixed.

“There was a recording that said if you’re calling from Rochester, you’ve got a problem,” Stephen Lambert told WROC-TV. “I wish someone would tell me what the problem is.”

By late Sunday, customers took to social media to blast Frontier for its lack of response.

“[Frontier’s] Internet goes down constantly,” complained Rochester resident Mary Ellen Frye. “They are aware of the problem but have no idea when it will be fixed. [Their] service level [is] erratic and totally unacceptable!”

Sharon McCauley Barger was without Frontier Internet for two days in Wheatfield (near Niagara Falls).

“We had to add 2GB to our mobile plan because of this,” she complained.

For businesses affected by the outage, the costs were even higher.

A gas station on Winton Road in Rochester lost business as customers discovered their credit cards wouldn’t work because Frontier’s Internet was offline.

Manager Angel Perez told WROC there is every chance the damage done will last longer than the outage itself.

“The impact is definitely lost sales, customers. You don’t know, they just might not come back,” Perez said.

Eva McDaniel can commiserate. Her service has been out for weeks. She let Frontier know she was fed up with them for the last time.

“Very poor customer service and no resolution on an Internet outage for over a month,” she told the company on their Facebook page. “Good riddance Frontier! I am done!”

Frontier eventually issued a statement that a circuit board was responsible for the failure but it would take several more hours before service was restored. Although Frontier claimed they first received reports of the outage “late Sunday,” Stop the Cap! confirmed customers started calling Frontier about service problems early Sunday morning. Multiple customers were able to confirm the outage began around 7:30am Sunday and ended just before 10:30am Monday morning — more than 24 hours later.

Internet Service Providers are deregulated and are not required to report service outages except when they impact telephone service. The New York Public Service Commission does collect statistics about service outages, mostly as a result of customer complaints.

Customers have some recourse when an outage occurs:

1. Request a service credit for the outage. Providers typically do not give credit unless it is requested. For each day you experience a service outage, Frontier should credit you for one day of service. Multiple outages or extended service problems often call for even larger service credits, especially in response to a complaint filed with a state regulator;
2. File a complaint with a state regulator and/or the FCC. Providers with a poor service record could attract the attention of state or federal officials and provide useful ammunition when a company seeks to expand by buying up other providers and service areas.
3. If service problems are frequent, change providers if you can.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WROC Rochester Frontier outage frustrates customers 8-10-15.mp4[/flv]

Stop the Cap! talks with WROC-TV about the major Internet outage affecting Frontier Communications DSL service in western New York. (2:36)

“Dealing with Mediacom is like stepping on a mound of fire ants,” says June Watts, a Mediacom customer in Alabama. “You are going to get stung no matter what you do.”

Watts is one of many unhappy Mediacom customers that once again bottom-rated the cable company into last place in Consumer Reports annual survey of telecommunications providers. In every case, Mediacom scored the worst or nearly the worst on bundled services, Internet, phone, television, service quality, and pricing.

“Missing channels, stuck channels, inconsistent Internet speeds, Internet and phone outages, boxes that won’t stay authorized, and wait times up to 45 minutes to get them on the phone are all part of my experience with them,” Watts tells Stop the Cap! “It never gets better because once they fix one thing something else breaks.”

Mediacom’s customer service forums offer some clues about what makes Mediacom such a problem for its customers. “Cyberpunk 1161” pays for 100/20Mbps service but is lucky to get 10% of that speed on a good day. He started corresponding about his speed issues with Mediacom’s social media team on Feb. 19. He is still having issues as of June 2, nearly four months later, and his conversation with Mediacom has now extended to 15 pages. “WhiteBengal50” has already managed three pages of complaints starting on May 18. Another customer spent one year and four months with his cable line left unburied on his lawn.

“They run a poorly maintained operation in mostly rural communities larger companies don’t want to deal with,” said Jerry Butler, a Mediacom customer in Iowa. “They are trying to keep up with larger operators but they have not invested nearly enough in reliability, which alienates customers with regular service outages and ongoing technical issues.”

Butler notes he can buy 100Mbps broadband service from Mediacom, but he won’t actually see 100Mbps speeds because the cable infrastructure between him and the cable office has deteriorated over the years.

“They need new overhead cable on their poles but they won’t spend the money to do it,” Butler said. “Cable operators should be budgeting to replace system components approaching their expected end of life instead of waiting for them to fail. They could also use more monitoring tools to find deteriorating infrastructure and replace it before it fails.”