Residents of Auburn, Alabama will one day have a choice for cable television service.  Incumbent cable company, Charter Cable, which has been in bankruptcy, will eventually face competition from Knology, a cable “overbuilder” servicing more than a dozen cities in the southeastern U.S.

The Auburn City Council unanimously agreed Tuesday night to begin a non-exclusive cable franchise agreement with Knology, based in West Point, Georgia.  The cable company already serves several other Alabama communities including Dothan, Huntsville, Lanett, Montgomery, and Valley, and expects approval to construct a system in nearby Opelika shortly.

The decision to bring competition to the city of 56,000 was an easy one because residents demanded more choice:

“Thank goodness this has finally happened.  It is time that people in this area had a choice regarding their cable.  Charter has provided poor customer service as well as poor cable and internet service for years.  I am surprised that my internet has stayed up long enough for me to type this!” — psych1

“This makes my day, now all we need is for satellite to have rights to the local channels and we’ll truly have the competition and choice we deserve…this is a huge step though!” — Matt

“I will dump Charter the second Knology is here.” — lp95

“Now we just need this in Opelika. I hate Charter with all my being.” — jackburnt

“Thank Goodness!  Charter is surely the worst cable company in history. I hope nobody reading this fell for their BS “contract” pricing lately.  They knew this was coming and tried to tie folks down for at least another year. This is truly a victory for the people of Auburn.” — tboone

“I am glad to see competition is coming in,” Ward 1 council member Arthur L. Dowdell told the Opelika-Auburn News. “I wish there was more coming in.”

One question remains on the table — When will Knology commence service in the area?

Chad S. Wachter, general counsel for Knology, said he didn’t know when Knology will be available for city residents.

“We’ll provide those answers with the city when we get them,” he said.

Ward 7 council member Gene Dulaney, the News noted, encouraged Wachter to build as fast as possible.

Charter Cable representatives followed the usual playbook cable operators use when competition is imminent.

Skip James, Charter’s director of government relations, addressed the council during citizens’ communications to express the company’s support for competition.

“We competed with Knology in the past and we will continue to in the future,” he said.

Knology provides customers with cable television, telephone and broadband services.  Most of their systems offer broadband at around 8Mbps and there doesn’t appear to be a limit.  Knology is quietly upgrading their systems to DOCSIS 3 to provide “wideband” service, cable’s designated turn of phrase for next generation broadband speeds.  But the company is also following a familiar pattern of not spending the money to upgrade where competitive pressure doesn’t exist.

Knology chairman and CEO Rodger Johnson told investors during a 1st quarter 2009 earnings call that the company was prepared to upgrade, but isn’t going to jump the gun.

“We are enabling our markets to deliver Docsis 3.0 when we decide the time is right to push the trigger,” Johnson said. “A very expensive piece of that proposition is the transition of the cable modems to 3.0 cable modems. We will make that move at the time that we’re feeling competitive pressures to move to a 3.0 environment, but not until that time.”

Johnson should be careful about waiting too long.  Pinellas County is one of Knology’s service areas in Florida, and it has Verizon FiOS and Bright House Networks fighting for customers in an upgrade war Knology cannot win with slower broadband.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Knology – Choices Ad.mp4[/flv]

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p style=”text-align: center;”>Knology “Choices” Ad (30 seconds)

Frontier Communications has won approval from state utility commissions in California, South Carolina, and Nevada to take over telephone service currently provided by Verizon Communications.  The decisions were unanimous in all three votes by Commission members, and involve telephone service in several small communities in all three states.

Verizon’s castoffs serve a small percentage of customers, which made the transaction fly under the media radar in most cases.  In California, Verizon dumps customers in a small section on the northwest border with Oregon.  In Nevada, several small communities south of Reno are involved.  In South Carolina, Verizon drops scattered groups of customers in small clusters across the state.

These state regulatory approvals follow an October 27 announcement by Frontier that its shareholders have approved the transaction, which will result in Frontier owning Verizon’s wireline operations in all or parts of 14 states.

While the approval appeared pro forma in those three states, West Virginia is another matter.  Strong employee union and consumer group protests continue across the state, with many consumers concerned about the implications of Frontier controlling nearly all wired phone lines in the state.  The Communications Workers of America held a conference call with the media Wednesday to outline its opposition to the deal.

The CWA has been a vocal opponent of the deal, claiming it will risk West Virginia’s telecommunications future with a company without the financial capacity to provide the type of advanced services Verizon is providing in other states.  Kenneth Peres, an economist with the Communications Workers of America, said the deal was extremely risky for consumers, workers and the affected communities.

Peres pointed to the perfect record of three out of three failures for earlier Verizon spinoffs.  FairPoint Communications declared bankruptcy early this week after trying to take on the service needs of three New England states.

Peres told the Charleston Daily Mail that if the deal goes through, Frontier “will find it extremely difficult” to meet its $8 billion in debt obligations while simultaneously investing enough capital to maintain its physical plant, improve service quality, set up a new system in West Virginia, lease systems from Verizon in 13 other states, provide video service for the first time (in Indiana), and ensure adequate staffing “while paying out a lot more in dividends than it makes in profits.”

Frontier went on the attack Thursday, accusing the union of interfering just to grab concessions for itself.

Verizon service areas sold off to Frontier in South Carolina

Steve Crosby, Frontier spokesman, said, “They’re just throwing stuff up against the wall. They know this is a good transaction and they’re trying to extract their pound of flesh. They want more concessions. This is their opportunity to ask for more money for their union membership and more benefits. That’s what they want. Union membership across the country is declining. This is how they’re trying to extract as much as they can from either Frontier or Verizon.”

As for Frontier’s debt load, “This is actually a de-leveraging transaction,” Crosby said. “We’re taking on debt but we’re taking on a whole lot more revenue. We’re currently at a 3.8 times revenue-to-debt ratio, going down to 2.6. So we actually get better in terms of revenue to debt. And today we’re fine. We’re able to pay a nice dividend. The day the transaction closes, we are approaching investment-grade borrowings.

“Our board of directors made the decision to lower our dividend by 25 percent when the transaction closes to give us even more cash to invest in infrastructure and to give us even more financial flexibility,” Crosby said.

“Every time we have an argument we win and they bring up other stuff,” Crosby said. “They never bring up the de-leveraging because it undermines their argument. They never bring up the fact that we will reduce our dividend because it undermines their argument.

“We have said we will maintain employment levels for 18 months” after the transaction closes, Crosby said. Because of required regulatory approvals and other factors, the deal can’t close before April 2010.

“So you can figure that’s two years,” Crosby said. “Who nowadays has that kind of job security? I think we’re bending over backwards. I wish I had the pension plan, the job security the CWA has. They’re looking at extracting more from Verizon and Frontier.”

When asked by the newspaper why Frontier shareholders would approve a deal that was destined for failure, Peres told the newspaper:

Frontier’s business model is built on acquisitions. Frontier bought a portion of Global Crossing’s business which increased revenue and access lines “but that began to decline,” he said. “They bought Commonwealth Telephone but that’s flat-lining. What’s the next step? What were they going to do – improve infrastructure or go through the acquisitions route again?” Continuing with acquisitions “postpones the day of reckoning,” he said.

Commentary: Our Take

Crosby’s comments seem more suited for a talk show audience that hates unions.  Obviously the union does not think this is a good deal for West Virginia, and considering the track record of earlier Verizon deals, and the correct predictions from employee unions on their inevitable outcomes, they have every right to oppose the deal on its face.  Crosby apparently has time to address declining union membership, but not the much more relevant decline in the traditional phone company’s bread and butter business – landlines.  Frontier, like other phone companies, continues to see disconnect requests coming from coast to coast as customers dump the phone company for a cable digital phone product, Voice Over IP line, or rely on their cellphone.

Verizon recognizes their traditional business is a dying one, which is why they are in a hurry to diversify into competitive broadband and video services over their fiber optic FiOS network.  Where it doesn’t make economic sense (under their current business plan) for Verizon to deploy FiOS, decisions are being made about whether to keep those smaller phone operations within the Verizon family, or sell them off to companies like Frontier.  What Frontier acquires today from the standpoint of customers and revenues could represent the high water mark, and without offering robust options for a digital future, Frontier will likely continue to see customer erosion.

FairPoint acquired seemingly healthy Verizon companies serving the entire states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.  When their efforts to seamlessly combine Verizon’s legacy systems with FairPoint’s own systems failed, that along with an inability to properly service customers, caused a death spiral as customers dropped service, which led FairPoint straight into bankruptcy.

Frontier’s record of investment and service in western New York speaks for itself.  Time Warner Cable eats Frontier for lunch, with less expensive “digital phone” service, much faster and more reliable broadband, and a video package that Frontier doesn’t offer (reselling DISH Network is hardly the same as providing video service that doesn’t come from a third party company’s satellite dish nailed to the roof).  Frontier is ready and willing to stick with DSL service at speeds that are basically maxed out.  Time Warner Cable evidently doesn’t even consider Frontier a significant enough player to deploy upgrades in this area while they are in a hurry to provide them where Verizon FiOS is under construction.

When a company isn’t prepared to keep up with the rest of New York with fiber deployment to the home, the chances of that kind of service reaching West Virginia anytime soon are near zero.

But Frontier’s unique position as a specialist in “rural service” allows it to eke out an existence in areas where cable isn’t a big competitive threat, and where any broadband is better than no broadband at all, at least for now.  But without a plan for keeping up with the fast changing broadband world, customers happy with 3Mbps service today will despise the company for being stuck with those speeds later.  A lot of people in Rochester sure aren’t happy being stuck with Frontier DSL, and that nasty 5GB “reasonable use” language in the Acceptable Use Policy.

Crosby’s comments about CWA member job security, which he evidently envies, says more about the union’s commitment to its members than Frontier has to him.  Perhaps Crosby can quit his spokesman job and switch to a position that gets him CWA membership with a pension and job security.  Perhaps if the people of West Virginia say thanks, but no thanks, Frontier will be in a better economic state than it would be if this mega-deal collapses under the weight of debt and integration challenges.  Then Crosby can keep his job with the evidently lousy benefits.

Peres’ assumption that Frontier lives only through acquisitions isn’t the complete story.  Just like the myth sharks must constantly swim to survive, Frontier doesn’t constantly have to acquire to survive either.  It does have to concern itself with an ever-consolidating telephone line industry, where the smaller independent companies continue to be snapped up by a dwindling number of players.  If a Windstream or CenturyTel comes along with a great offer, Frontier itself may have a new name — Windstream or CenturyTel.

The economies of scale and cost savings are routinely cited by investors promoting consolidation.  It’s no surprise Frontier shareholders voted for the deal.  Bigger is often better for many investors, as long as the quarterly financials play to their interests.  Listening to Frontier investor conference calls, the Wall Street bankers, and the media that support them, are constantly concerned with keeping costs cut to the bone, customer defection limited, risk reasonable, and that dividend being paid.  They are satisfied with Frontier’s rural, less competitive market focus, even if the customers that end up served by them are not.

It’s appropriate that it is snowing heavily in Denver as attendees of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers meet at Cable-Tec Expo ’09, under the banner “Touch the Technology.”

Yesterday’s Technology Leadership Roundtable, according to Lightwave’s Steven Hardy, was reserved for out of touch Verizon fiber bashing:

The title of this morning’s Technology Leadership Roundtable was “Enough Already!” “Enough of what?” you ask. Answers the roundtable description: “Growing a little weary of all that FiOS in your face?” The short answer, not surprisingly, is yes. Roundtable moderator Leslie Ellis (Ellis Edits LLC) opened the discussion by asking whether the cable-TV community should be defensive about the fact that it hasn’t fully embraced FTTH — particularly since the industry invented video over fiber and carries more video over fiber than anyone else.

Much pooh-poohing of FTTH and telcos ensued. Paul Liao, president and CEO of CableLabs, said that the MSOs are the big dogs when it comes to video and becoming big dogs in voice delivery — and when you’re a big dog, you’re going to attract competitive attention.

Dermot O’Carroll, SVP, engineering and network operations, at Rogers Cable Communications up in Canada, asserted that fiber “doesn’t do much” for voice or video (I assume he meant fiber access versus HFC) and perhaps only a little bit when it comes to Internet access. This last shortfall should go away with deployment of DOCSIS 3.0, he said.

Liao agreed that DOCSIS 3.0-enabled HFC should prove more than adequate for customer needs today and into the future, adding that DOCSIS 3.0 should enable more bandwidth than anyone will ever need. (This sounds like one of those “eat your words in 10 years or less” statements, but Liao is certainly smarter than I am and more versed in DOCSIS 3.0 capabilities.)

Meanwhile, at least two workshops later in the week will discuss how to migrate HFC networks to FTTH. It doesn’t hurt to hedge your bets, apparently. Getting a better understanding of how MSOs really feel about FTTH is one of my goals here.

The cable industry has routinely confronted the threat of fiber optics by dismissing it as irrelevant wizardry until they are forced to upgrade their networks to try and match the capabilities a well run fiber to the home system can provide.  Broadband service with equal upload and download speeds on cable?  Not so much.  The sheer bandwidth potential of fiber optics?  Quite nice, thank you.  The potential for Verizon FiOS to be positioned to meet the current and future needs of customers without a lot of expensive upgrades?  Very high, assuming it’s priced competitively.

Fiber bashing snowjob from Time Warner Cable

Rogers Cable has a point when they dismiss fiber’s potential for broadband.  That’s because the company treats its customers to a host of Internet Overcharging schemes which provide blazing fast speeds that customers can’t use for very long without facing overlimit charges on next month’s bill.  Few companies want to provide robust video broadband service in a country where such usage limits and other schemes prevail from Vancouver to St. John’s.

Consumers across 13 states impacted by the proposed Verizon sale to Frontier Communications, as well as existing Frontier customers, should tell regulators to reject the deal.

Those of us living and working in Rochester, New York are extremely familiar with Frontier Communications.  For more than 100 years, Rochester Telephone Corporation provided excellent, independent telephone service to Rochester and a significant part of the Genesee Valley.  The company had a reputation for excellent reliability and charged rates considerably lower than New York Telephone, a Bell subsidiary, in other upstate cities like Buffalo and Syracuse.  In 1995, Rochester Telephone was renamed Frontier Communications, because the company wanted to position itself as something more than just a phone company.

Frontier was acquired in 2001 by Citizens Communications of Stamford, Connecticut, who has provided service ever since.  Ironically, that company thought Frontier was a better name than the one they had used for decades, and Citizens renamed themselves Frontier Communications in 2008.

Today, Frontier Communications serves just under three million customers, primarily in suburban and rural communities in 24 states.

Since Citizens acquired Frontier, and its largest operating service area in metropolitan Rochester, the company has made some changes to the local telephone network.  Fiber optic connections are now common between their central offices and smaller “satellite” central offices.  A local wi-fi network was installed in association with Monroe County, in part as a political maneuver to stop municipally owned and operated affordable wi-fi networks from getting off the ground.  As a concession to the county, a much smaller “free” wi-fi network was also included. (See below the jump for video news coverage of Frontier’s promises vs. reality)

The company’s broadband service relies on ADSL technology delivered by traditional copper telephone wiring, providing service in Rochester at speeds up to a theoretical 10Mbps.  Actual speeds vary tremendously depending on the distance between your home or business and the telephone company central office serving it.  In most smaller communities, speeds are far lower.  In Cowen, West Virginia, Frontier markets broadband service at just 3Mbps, a typical speed for Frontier’s smaller service areas.

Unfortunately, Frontier has shown no initiative to move beyond offering traditional DSL service to its customers, including those in western New York.  Across other New York State cities, Verizon is taking a far different approach.  In larger communities, it is aggressively installing fiber optic wiring to both homes and businesses.  Verizon FiOS positions the company to effectively compete against their traditionally closest competitor – cable television.  For several years, cable operators have offered a better deal for its “digital phone” service, which works with existing home phones but delivered over cable TV lines, often charging less than a traditional phone line, and cable throws in free long distance on many of its plans.

The ubiquitous cell phone has not helped.  Many younger Americans can’t understand why they would want to bother getting a traditional phone line, when the mobile phone in their pocket works just fine, and they can take it with them wherever they go. The result has been a steady erosion of traditional “wireline” phone lines, and a corresponding decline in the revenue earned from the service in many areas.

In September Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg told a Goldman Sachs investor conference that the wired phone line business was effectively dead.  Seidenberg recognized that trying to guess when the company would stop losing “landline” customers was like guessing when a dog will stop chasing a bus.  In other words, the future of Ma Bell is not delivering phone service — it’s deploying advanced networks that are capable of providing customers with video, broadband, and phone service across one wire, preferably a fiber optic one.  Those that can manage the transition will succeed, those who cannot or won’t will face a steady decline to obsolescence.

There is only one major problem — it costs a lot of money to rewire entire communities, much less states, with fiber optic wiring.  It’s like building a phone network from scratch.  A company contemplating such a challenging undertaking starts by asking how much it is going to cost and when will it profit from its investment.  Many on Wall Street don’t like either question because of the up front cost, and are even less happy with the prospect of taking the long view waiting for those costs to be recouped from customers.

To date, Verizon is the most aggressive major phone company in the nation building a pure fiber optic system in its larger service areas.  AT&T, which provides phone service in many states, has taken a more cautious approach using a hybrid fiber-copper wire design they market as U-verse.  A handful of independent phone companies and municipally owned providers have undertaken to wire fiber optics to the home as well, so they can sell video, telephone and broadband service to their customers.

A major challenge confronts phone companies servicing more distant suburban and rural phone customers, often living far apart from one another in sparsely populated regions.  It costs more to service these customers, and the potential revenue gained is often not as great as what can be earned from their urban cousins.  Verizon doesn’t see many rural customers as part of their future business plans and have begun to systematically sell some areas off to other phone companies, usually in tax-free transactions.  One company that sees an ambitious future in serving rural America is Frontier Communications.  For them, finding a niche among the big boys gives them safety and security, particularly in areas that don’t have a cable competitor (or any competitor at all).

Frontier’s acquisition strategy is to sell regulators and the public on the idea that allowing Frontier in guarantees a much better chance for broadband service to reach the communities Verizon skipped over.  Their argument for success in a business seeing steady declines in customers is that broadband service will stem the tide, and help them remain profitable.  More than doubling their size with the acquisition of Verizon’s latest castoffs means more opportunity to market broadband service to those underserved communities.  Frontier argues it can be a more nimble player than Verizon because it has marketing and service experience in rural communities previously ignored by Verizon.

Frontier’s ability to provide broadband service is not the most important question.  More important is how Frontier will define broadband and at what speed. Also critically important is how Frontier will be prepared to deliver the next generation broadband platform that other communities will see with speeds up to 100Mbps, often on fiber optic networks.

Frontier’s reliance on ADSL technology, which worked fine for 1990s Internet connectivity, is increasingly falling behind in the speed race, and for much of the next generation of online content, speed will matter very much.

Unfortunately, the track record for the success of these spinoffs has been universally lousy for consumers and for many employees who live and work in the impacted communities.  Promises made quickly become promises delayed, and later broken as companies like Hawaii Telecom and FairPoint tried to integrate former Verizon operations into their own.  Service outages, billing errors, confusion, and finally a mass exodus by customers looking for better alternatives has been the repeated result.  The faster customers depart, combined with the enormous debt these transactions create for the buyer, the faster the journey ends in Bankruptcy Court.  There is nothing about the Frontier deal proposal that suggests their experience will be any different.

Shouldn’t Three Strikes Mean You Are Out?

Consumers should tell state regulators they should pay careful attention to the failures Verizon has left in its wake from previous deals:

• FairPoint Communications, which assumed control of phone service in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont just last year declared bankruptcy this morning, even now still plaguing customers with billing and service problems.  The company choked on the debt it incurred from financing the deal.  Before this morning’s bankruptcy, their stock price had lost 95% of its value, and customers were leaving in droves, only accelerating the company’s demise.  FairPoint thought it could integrate Verizon’s byzantine billing system into its own.  Thinking and doing turned out to be two entirely different things.  Frontier has experience integrating other small independent phone companies into its billing system, but now faces the same prospect of dealing with Verizon’s own way of doing everything, and for twice the number of customers Frontier serves today.
• Hawaii Telecom and its 715,000 customers were dumped by Verizon in 2005.  Once again, transition issues plagued the post-sale experience for those customers, and almost a quarter fled the company over three years.  Last December, Hawaii Telecom declared bankruptcy.
• Verizon’s yellow pages unit was also thrown overboard by the company to Idearc in November 2006.  Saddled with $9.5 billion in debt and interest payments representing almost one quarter of the entire company’s revenues, Idearc finally had enough in March 2009 when it also declared bankruptcy.

The deal between Verizon and Frontier could easily follow the same path, as Frontier gets loaded down with massive debt financing the purchase, and has to immediately provide better service than Verizon did, or face a stampede of customers heading for the exit.  The impact of a debt-laden Frontier could be felt by more than just the newcomers.  Existing Frontier customers could also be impacted as the company turns its attention to a potentially lengthy integration process.

The Promise of Anemic Broadband, The Fiber Myth & The 5GB Acceptable Use Policy

Frontier’s plan to bring broadband to a larger number of customers is a noble gesture, particularly for households that currently do not receive any broadband service.  Unfortunately, a short term gain of what will likely be 1-3Mbps DSL service will leave these communities behind in the next few years as broadband speeds accelerate far faster than what Frontier is prepared to provide.

Some press accounts in West Virginia have left residents with the impression fiber optic service will reach their individual homes should Frontier be successful in purchasing Verizon’s assets.  There is no evidence to suggest this is true.

In earlier deals, these kinds of rumors started when companies advocating the sale staged press-friendly events announcing a fiber connection between hospitals, schools, or community centers, allowing the media to give the impression there would be fiber upgrades for all… if the deal gets approved.  In the case of Frontier, they have suggested they will continue work on Verizon’s FiOS system in the communities where construction was already underway.  That’s an important distinction for the millions of customers who don’t live in those communities.  Verizon’s FiOS network that is part of this transaction serves less than 70,000 residents.

Residents should consider what possibility their community has of obtaining this type of advanced service when Frontier refuses to provide anything comparable in their largest service area – Rochester, New York.

If they are not doing it in Rochester, do you really believe they will do it in your community?

The company certainly has a competitive need to provide such service in our city where Time Warner Cable has accelerated speeds beyond what Frontier is capable of providing.  Indeed, Time Warner Cable officials tout their largest number of new Road Runner broadband sign-ups comes from departing DSL customers who are fed up with the anemic, inconsistent speeds offered by this aging technology.

In the town of Brighton, I gave Frontier DSL service a try this past spring.  The company promises up to 10Mbps of service to my area, which is less than 1/2 mile from the city of Rochester, and literally just a few blocks from the town’s business center.  After installation, the company was only able to provide me with service at 3.1Mbps, just less than one-third of the speed marketed to local residents.  Even more surprising was the fact they charged a higher price for that service (including taxes, fees, and modem rental charge) than their competitor, Time Warner Cable.

This website was founded after Frontier inserted language into its Acceptable Use Policy defining “reasonable” broadband usage at just five gigabytes per month.  That’s right, the same limit your mobile phone provider applies to their wireless broadband service.  Viewing one HD movie over Frontier’s DSL service would put you perilously close to unreasonable use.

Are consumers willing to give up unlimited Verizon DSL service for a company that refuses to drop a 5GB acceptable usage definition from their terms and conditions?

America is on the threshold of 50-100Mbps broadband service, with some communities already enjoying those speeds.  If your community isn’t served by a competing provider, do you want to limit your future to yesterday’s DSL technology, and then told it is inappropriate for you to actually use it beyond five gigabytes per month?

The Billing and Customer Service Nightmare

The days of local customer service are over with Frontier.  Back during the days of Rochester Telephone, there were several occasions when a local customer service representative would recognize me by name.  Those days are long gone.  Now, a good deal of Frontier’s customer service is handled by a call center in DeLand, Florida.  While the representatives mean well, experiences with them suggest many are not well equipped to understand and consistently market Frontier’s products to existing customers.  Pile on more than double the number of new customers, and the problems are likely to become much worse.

Frontier has personally plagued me with billing errors this past year, gave inconsistent and inaccurate answers to pricing and service inquiries, and created major runaround hassles to correct them.  From the DSL self-install kit that never arrived (requiring me to visit a local office to pick one up myself), to the impenetrable and inaccurate bills that resulted, the company could not correct the problems without consulting someone with supervisor status.  I canceled service within the month.

Customers signing up for service have been pressured into “peace of mind” agreements that lock customers into long term contracts that automatically renew unless the customer actively cancels them (and is certain the request to cancel was processed correctly.)  Frontier has been fined twice by the New York State Attorney General for “misleading advertising and marketing tactics,” once in 2006 and again just a few weeks ago.  Some customers are now waiting for substantial refunds ranging from $50-400 dollars for “early termination fees” charged when they tried to cancel service.

Are you comfortable knowing some customers have been inappropriately placed on a one to three year contract without their full informed consent, and billed hundreds of dollars when they tried to cancel?

The Art of the Deal

By no means will a Verizon-Frontier transaction be the last.  As the industry continues to consolidate around a dwindling number of wired phone line customers, it’s a safe bet there will be more phone customers thrown away by the bigger players.  Nothing guarantees Frontier itself will be freestanding when the consolidation wave ends.  While these deals may make sense for some shareholders and company executives, they often don’t for local experienced employees who know the network and how to provide quality service.  They never have for consumers who will always have to foot the bill to pay off these transactions and have to live with the company trying to integrate Verizon’s bureaucracy with their own.

What is the ultimate price to pay?  For employees — their jobs, and as FairPoint employees are discovering today, those workers are being asked to pay the price for management mistakes.  In West Virginia, some of the most experienced Verizon employees are getting out with their pensions intact, not willing to take a chance on Frontier.  For customers living with FairPoint, horror stories of weeks without service, $400 phone bills for service long since canceled, company technicians that cannot find the customer even when they are located right next door to the phone company, and broken promise after broken promise continue.

Some consumer groups and local workers correctly predicted, in each instance, the horrific outcome of these kinds of deals.  Their uncanny knack to correctly predict disaster contrasts with company marketing, lobbying, and astroturf efforts that promise the sky and tell each successive news reporter covering the latest atrocity that “things are getting better” and “will be fixed soon.”  Unfortunately for too many customers, the fix has to come from a judge in Bankruptcy Court.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers who repeatedly warned about the perils of FairPoint, now warns state regulators about Frontier, and direct attention to the numbers:

If the transaction is approved, Frontier management will have to deal with a 300% increase in access lines (from 2.2 million access lines now to 7 million after the sale) and a 200% increase in employees (from 5,700 employees now to 16,700 after the sale).

Frontier’s debt will increase from $4.55 billion to $8 billion—an increase of over $3.4 billion. Servicing this debt will mean less money for infrastructure, service quality, and high-speed internet build out.

While Frontier argues that somehow this deal will make it stronger, the issue for the states being sold is how much weaker it will make the operations in those states.

The leverage ratio is one way to measure the financial health of a company. The leverage ratio is calculated by taking net debt and dividing it by earnings (before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization). The leverage ratio for the states being sold will increase from 1.7 immediately before the transaction closes to 2.6 after the sale. The entire deal revolves around Frontier’s ability to cut its operational expenses by $500 million or 21%.

This is significantly greater than the 8-10% cut that FairPoint hoped to achieve—and much of these savings were to be generated from replacing Verizon’s network and back-office systems. Yet, Frontier states that all of the operations except for West Virginia will continue on Verizon’s existing systems—for which Frontier will pay a fee.

Where will Frontier generate the savings—from reduced service quality, workforce, or maintenance of the communications infrastructure? In spite of brave talk from Verizon and Frontier, as recent events have demonstrated, obtaining financing for a transaction this size can be difficult. Frontier does not currently have financing for the additional debt it will take on for this transaction.

As an existing Frontier customer, I’d like an answer myself.

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Watch these two Wall Street guys talk about the previous Verizon deals that threw customers under the bus.  Plenty of praise for the skilled deal maker Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, and no concern for you, the consumer and telephone customer impacted by a deal that got a few people very rich and left you with a bankrupt phone company.  (3 minutes)

It’s Not Worth the Risk

Unfortunately, for too many rural Americans impacted by this deal, there is only one phone company.  Cable television is not in their future, and in mountainous regions like West Virginia, wireless phones may not be suitable as a phone line replacement.  Risking 100 years of solvent phone service on a deal that could ultimately follow earlier deals into bankruptcy is not worth the risk.  The nightmares of converting operations from one provider to another is a hassle consumers should not have to face.

For decades, you faithfully paid your Verizon telephone bill and made the company the telecommunications powerhouse it is today.  Now they want to abandon you because, frankly, you just aren’t important enough to them anymore.  It doesn’t have to be this way.  State regulators can tell Verizon they need to make different plans — by forgetting about trying to cash in on a deal that is good for them and bad for you, and by staying put and providing consumers with the same kinds of network upgrades they are building in communities across the country.

Unfortunately, Frontier before this deal was ill-equipped to embark on the kind of investment necessary to provide fiber optic broadband connectivity to its customers.  Now pile on billions of additional debt and the challenge of trying to more than double their size and integrate diverse phone networks in 13 different states and ponder what the chances will be for fiber service after the deal is done.  Far more likely for residents is a company that will rely on slow speed DSL service, providing “good enough for them” broadband for the indefinite future.

Take Action!

As has been the case with Hawaii Telecom and FairPoint, naive regulators believed the false promises and approved earlier deals, and are frankly responsible for part of the blame.  Face-saving telecommunications regulators in New England initially even tried to cheerlead for FairPoint as they stumbled through one customer service nightmare after another.  Too late, they realized the grim reality that their approval saddled their states with a phone company totally unequipped to do the job.

Consumers who do not want a repeat performance can contact their state representatives and tell them to put pressure on each state’s public utility commission to reject the deal.  You should also contact your state’s public utility commission yourself.

No amount of concessions and written agreements will make a difference if that phone company ends up in financial distress and takes a walk to Bankruptcy Court.  Regulators should not even bother trying, after witnessing the debacle with FairPoint.

In your polite, persuasive and persistent communication with state officials, let them know:

• We’ve been down this road with Verizon before, with FairPoint Communications and Hawaii Telecom, leaving a litany of broken service promises, unfulfilled broadband commitments, unacceptable billing mistakes, and poor quality customer service.  In both instances, customers fled and the companies ended up in bankruptcy;
• Frontier has been unable or unwilling to wire its largest service area, Rochester, New York, with the advanced fiber connectivity that Verizon is wiring throughout the rest of upstate New York.  If the company cannot meet the needs of customers in their largest service area, what in the world makes you think they’ll do it for us?
• The company has been fined twice by the New York State Attorney General for dubious business practices, costing consumers hundreds of dollars the company has now agreed to return to those customers;
• A broadband service for our community’s future should not come with a 5 gigabyte monthly limit attached in the fine print.  How can our community compete in the digital economy if you have to ration your broadband usage to an unprecedented level in wired broadband?
• The devil is always in the details.  Verizon has an aggressive plan to stay relevant in a digital future, with video, telephone, and Internet service running across advanced fiber optic lines.  Frontier has a plan to serve rural communities with yesterday’s technology.  Frontier’s vision for video is to “get a satellite dish” and rely on the existing aging copper wiring to do everything else.
• What kind of service and growth can we expect from a company mired in debt?  As seasoned Verizon employees in our community start retiring, understanding the writing on the wall, what do they know that you and I don’t?
• Phone companies are a regulated utility, essential to the public interest.  Why permit a risky deal that could ultimately lead to a taxpayer bailout to keep operations running if Frontier follows its predecessors into bankruptcy, all while Verizon walks away with billions in proceeds?

You can locate the names and contact information for your state representative(s) on Congress.org simply by entering your zip code.  When calling or writing, always be courteous, and request that your representative respond in writing to your concerns, and share with Stop the Cap! any correspondence you receive in reply.  As always, we’ll be holding elected officials accountable.

Your next contact must be with your state public utility commission.  If a hearing is planned in your community, share your views in person and feel free to point them here if they want to watch how bad telecommunications deals have unfolded in the past.  We have countless hours of news reports archived for their viewing pleasure.  Each state has a different procedure for contacting them.  In West Virginia, for example, consumers can call the Commission at 1-800-642-8544.  Ohio residents can fill out an online form.

Perhaps Frontier can one day take on a transaction like this, but only after it can demonstrate it has the resources and willingness to provide customers with better options for service.  Had they done that in our community, local residents would not have taken to signing a petition for Verizon to overbuild, or buyout Frontier’s Rochester operation.  Local residents want the advantage fiber optic service can bring our community and its local economy, some even expressing a willingness to send $10 and $20 checks to Verizon for an acquisition fund to get the sale done.  When consumers give money to the phone company when they don’t owe anything, that should be a clear signal consumers are dissatisfied and want a change Frontier, thus far, has not provided.

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Broadband Reports this morning received word from an “insider” that Time Warner Cable is laying the groundwork to introduce “wideband” broadband service up to 50Mbps throughout New York State’s Verizon FiOS-wired communities.  According to the report, Time Warner Cable plans to launch faster DOCSIS 3.0 service in Buffalo in mid-November, Syracuse in December, and Albany in January.  The company introduced “wideband” service in metropolitan New York City a few weeks ago.

Omitted from the upgrade list is New York’s second largest economy and high tech capital of upstate New York — Rochester.  The city was in the news in April when Time Warner designated Rochester as one of the “test cities” for an Internet Overcharging experiment.  The plan was shelved when customers organized a mass revolt against the plan and two federal legislators intervened.

From a logical standpoint, it wouldn’t seem to make sense for a broadband provider to omit a region with more than one million residents, many who have been highly educated and work for the community’s largest employers – the University of Rochester/Strong Health, Eastman Kodak, Xerox, ViaHealth/Rochester General Hospital, Rochester Institute of Technology, Paychex, and ITT.

But from the all-important business standpoint, Time Warner Cable enjoys extraordinarily limited competition in the area, and the gap only widens in the coming future.  The area’s telephone provider, Frontier Communications, is known mostly for providing service in rural communities, and has so far offered lackluster plans for a 21st century broadband platform, preferring to rely on now-aging DSL technology while Verizon wires most comparably-sized cities in the rest of the state for advanced fiber-to-the-home FiOS service.

While Frontier can live comfortably in rural communities where cable television is not an option, customers who live and work in their largest service area continue to find disadvantages from a company business plan that these days seems more focused on mergers and acquisitions, and is content with language that defines an appropriate amount of monthly broadband usage at a ridiculously small 5 gigabytes per month.

Against a competitor like that, why would Time Warner Cable bother?