Schoharie County, New York

Schoharie County has the dubious distinction of being one of the New York counties least well-served with high speed broadband service.  In fact, according to the Schoharie County Telecommunications Task Force, our county is ranked last in the Capital Region, located in and around the state’s capital city Albany.

Last fall the Task Force concluded that almost half of the county’s residents had no access to broadband service at all, a point since disputed by one of the local telephone companies providing service to parts of the county, but regardless of who has access, residents are accustomed to taking whatever broadband service they can get.

Schoharie County has just over 31,000 residents across its 622 square miles.  It’s a beautiful place to live, especially along the southern parts of the county which lie within the Catskill Mountains.  Several small towns, villages and hamlets dot the county, providing a rural lifestyle but within easy reach of Schenectady and Albany.  Unfortunately, part of living in rural upstate New York is recognizing the reality of the digital divide.

The rural setting of Schoharie, NY

To our east, our bigger city neighbors enjoy access to Verizon fiber-based networks and Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner broadband service.  Broadband is fast, plentiful and relatively inexpensive.  But once pastures replace strip malls, it’s an entirely different story.

In much of Schoharie County, broadband service is provided by locally owned Middleburgh Telephone Company, which has been serving most of our area for over 100 years.  A few dozen employees cover everything from billing to repair and installation, and not just for telephone and broadband service, but also for cable television.  Midtel Cable TV, owned by the telephone company, serves many areas the bigger cable companies forgot.

Unfortunately, Middleburgh Telephone controls broadband, which means instead of providing cable broadband over Midtel, customers in much of Schoharie County are stuck with old-fashioned DSL service delivered by telephone lines.

While the hometown feel of the local phone company makes you feel like a valued customer when you deal with them, the broadband products they offer leave a bitter taste in your mouth.  MIDTEL.NET customers can look forward to an either/or proposition.  Either endure painfully slow DSL service or pay an exorbitant amount of money for the kind of broadband service speeds commonly available in larger communities.

MIDTEL.NET Price Chart
DSL – mSPEED Lite: $29.95/month — 384kbps download, 128kbps upload
DSL – mSPEED: $43.95/month — 3Mbps download, 500kbps upload (Prepay discount: 6 months – $250.00 or 12 months – $495.00)
DSL – mSPEED Plus: $59.95/month — 5Mbps download, 1Mbps upload (Prepay discount: 6 months – $340.00 or 12 months – $670.00)
DSL – mSPEED Premium: $164.95/month — 10Mbps download, 1.5Mbps upload (Prepay discount: 6 months – $940.00 or 12 months – $1,850.00)

While most residents are grateful for the optional higher speed services our friends and neighbors in other rural communities simply don’t have, the pricing makes it unaffordable for the vast majority of residents, who typically make due with the mSPEED $43.95/month service.

Of course, those speeds are not guaranteed.  Because I reside more than 10,000 feet from the local telephone company central office, I cannot really access any service plan above 3Mbps.  The higher speeds simply would not work.

You're in slow broadband country, too.

To our north, Frontier Communications provides telephone and broadband service to residents in Fulton, Herkimer, Clinton and Essex counties, as well as the western part of Montgomery County and parts of northern Saratoga County.  Frontier has taken ownership of several formerly independent telephone companies in eastern New York, as well as a few formerly owned by Rochester Telephone.  Frontier actually does a better job than Verizon in rural parts of upstate New York in providing at least some type of broadband service.  Large sections of the state still served by Verizon have no DSL or any other kind of broadband service.  Frontier does seem to pride itself with providing residents with broadband service, but not always consistently.

Stratford, Lassellsville, and Oppenheim, all within Fulton County are three communities with significant gaps.  All are within or adjacent to the Adirondack Park, which covers a section of the Adirondack Mountains.  At one point, several bypassed residents in Fulton County signed a petition and presented it to local Frontier officials, convincing them enough customers were willing to purchase the service to make it available to that neighborhood.

Frontier and Middleburgh Telephone both share an attitude of  requiring a “critical mass” of potential customers to make it worth their while to provide DSL service. Unfortunately, that cannot come fast enough for many underserved communities, whose local governments receive a steady stream of calls from residents wondering when broadband service will become available in their area.

Where Frontier does provide DSL service in rural upstate communities, it’s slow and expensive.

Frontier’s website for most of Fulton County shows two service plans available:

Frontier Communications DSL Price Chart
Frontier High-Speed Internet Lite – 768kbps  $39.99 per month
Frontier High-Speed Internet Max — up to 3Mbps  $49.99 per month

That pricing is before a $5 a month “modem rental fee,” and as least as much for taxes and surcharges.  Add at least $10 to the quoted price to cover all of these fees.  Frontier also likes to commit its customers to term commitments.  My friends in Frontier service areas are strongly pushed towards one, two, or even three year “price protection plans”, as well as a backup and support service called “Peace of Mind” which can add another $13 a month to your bill. Certain promotional bundle pricing can lower some of these costs, but not enough to erase the disparity in pricing between rural broadband service, and that provided in larger cities within easy driving distance.

The impact of unavailable or unaffordable broadband service can be severe, subjecting rural communities to economic disadvantages including:

• an inability for local small businesses to operate and/or maintain online websites to market products and services to customers;
• educational institutions are unable to effectively teach our children how to navigate the critically important online world;
• the impossibility of attracting high technology business and industry into underserved communities;
• a reduction in the quality of information and service available in rural public libraries;
• making life difficult for home-based teleworkers or telecommuters who conduct some/all of their employer’s work from home;
• a reduction in property values by reducing competition for available properties rejected by potential buyers because of lack of broadband access;
• a loss of potential innovation and online business start-ups because of lack of access;
• information disparity for residents unable to access online information the rest of the wired nation takes for granted.

So why do providers not provide universal access?  It’s a good question for some opinion leaders in this part of the state.

Gilboa, NY is just one of hundreds of small New York towns with "take it or leave it" broadband.

Anne Myers, the provost at SUNY Cobleskill, a state university, told the local newspaper that “Broadband is like rural electrification — it’s necessary for areas to move forward. There are things you can’t do if you don’t have broadband.”

Myers advocates for the same guarantee of access to broadband that Americans were given for electricity from the Roosevelt Administration’s electrification programs of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electric Administration.  Indeed, she could benefit from it, because her home in Summit, in Schoharie County, has no access to broadband either.

Unfortunately, the New York State Public Service Commission (NY PSC) has been less than aggressive in advocating for such an approach.  In fact, it has adopted a “free market” strategy and has become complacent and tolerant of the results: slow and expensive rural broadband, if it’s available at all.

The Public Utility Law Project of New York, a group advocating for universal access, has heavily criticized the NY PSC for what it calls, “in essence [arguments] for continued reliance on failing market-based policies, policies which exacerbate the digital divide and have left millions of households without broadband. A review of other comments filed with the FCC reveals that New York is behind the times and out of step with every other state that submitted comments [to the Federal Communications Commission].”

Lou Manuta, who writes for the PULP Blog, went much further:

Essentially, the PSC seems to be saying that policy makers elected by the people who see the importance of universal affordable broadband to the future of the economy and society should not disturb the results of the broadband “market” – which in most localities is a duopoly of landline and cable providers. Such blind faith in the market, however, has already left New York far behind countries that have been proactive with policies to lower the cost of broadband, increase speed and bandwidth, and increase its deployment and actual use by citizens. The PSC even questioned the need to bring broadband to every citizen today:

A broadband plan seeking to bring broadband immediately to 100 percent of the country may be ill-advised. A goal of 100 percent broadband deployment may not be economically rational with traditional, wired service. However, the evolution of technology, like third generation wireless, could provide more efficient and cost effective alternatives for ubiquitous broadband.

This is a familiar refrain to defend market power of existing providers: someday the market will bring providers with a new technology that magically would bring affordable service to unserved or underserved areas, so therefore regulators and government should do nothing.

Groups that provided comments similar to those of the PSC were free-market think tanks, such as Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks Foundation, and Americans for Tax Reform (ATR). ATR, founded by anti-tax radical Grover Norquist. The PSC’s positions closely resonate with the comments of ATR, which glossed over the market failure and reduced competitive position of the United States in comparison to other countries, and wrote:

We are on the right track; the free market is working. Consumers are enjoying an ever-expanding array of choices and performance. . . . In order for free-market models to provide for the further development of broadband access, however, it is absolutely critical that government intrusion not prevent private capital from recouping its investment. If private capital becomes convinced that its ability to recoup its investments is less likely, it will be less likely to make the significant investments in broadband that is the very goal of this FCC inquiry.”

Both the PSC and ATR take these “hands off” positions when it comes to the price and deployment decisions of the cable and phone company duopoly, even though

• millions of people who in theory have “access” to broadband cannot afford it,
• the U.S. has some of the world’s slowest, most costly broadband (per megabit per second),
• the U.S. subscribership rate has sunk from 4th to 15th in the world in recent years, even as other countries with more affirmative broadband policies surge ahead.

So what precisely keeps broadband providers from providing universal access and wiring all of their customers?  Profit and return.  The costs to construct extensions of their networks to reach even the most isolated customers isn’t worth the potential return, say most providers.

Could communities like Seward benefit from broadband stimulus funding?

Before the Obama Administration turns on the broadband stimulus faucet, the emergency federal economic stimulus package provided more than seven billion dollars for “shovel-ready” construction projects across the nation.  More than $175 million is targeted for New York state.  Despite Albany’s usual circus-like chaos, dysfunction, and a recent state Senate coup d’etat, Governor Paterson, the Senate and Assembly managed to identify 32 broadband projects that could be eligible for grants from the federal fund.  Competition for “free money” from everyone from educational groups to telephone companies to local municipalities is fierce, and will only grow more so when the federal broadband stimulus money begins to flow.

Both Frontier and Middleburgh Telephone believe federal stimulus funding may help improve the viability of reaching their most rural communities.

Middleburgh Telephone is even willing to partner with municipalities to provide service to areas it does not reach today, such as in Carlisle and Esperance.

But just as important as availability, according to Lou Manuta with PULP, is affordability.  Even where broadband is plentiful and less expensive than in rural areas, it’s still out of reach for many of New York’s poorest residents.  Manuta advocates providing special “Lifeline”-type broadband packages to disadvantaged state residents, which offer very basic broadband service for a very low price.

For residents in rural New York, change cannot come soon enough.  Without it, even big states like New York will leave hundreds of thousands of residents behind, stuck with slow broadband at unaffordable prices.

Jenny Pirro comes to Stop the Cap! as a consumer concerned about broadband service in rural communities.  She is a lifelong resident of upstate New York, recently retired from a career in banking.   She has been a customer of both Middleburgh Telephone and Frontier Communications.  For privacy, Jenny chooses to write under her maiden name.

Last November, residents in Morgan County, West Virginia became so exasperated with Verizon’s unwillingness to provide high speed DSL service in this rural region of the state, residents took to the streets holding signs proclaiming “Verizon neglects rural West Virginia” and “Honk for Broadband Internet.” A website called Abandoned By Verizon was launched to highlight the problem.

The problem? Verizon is spending its time, attention, and money on rewiring America’s larger cities with advanced fiber optic networks while selling off their rural customers to independent telephone companies.

Last year, Jennifer Carpenter-Peak and her husband Bob organized a public protest after being strung along by Verizon for more than three years for DSL broadband service. Each time they inquired about availability, they were told it was coming sometime later. Last fall, they were told to wait until sometime this year.

Of course, if the Peak family and their neighbors wanted service any quicker, they could always pony up the $10,000-100,000 the company wanted to wire their neighborhood, or opt for a slow T-1 commercial service line for around $500 a month.

Bob Peak told The Morgan Messenger it has been impossible to e-mail his photos and graphic designs from home. He takes his laptop and drives to town or to Cacapon State Park to send files.

“It’s become increasingly difficult to do business because all of my clients and vendors expect it,” Peak said of high-speed internet.

The Carpenter-Peak family also relied on some map data produced by Connected Nation’s ‘Connect West Virginia’ which broad-brushed Morgan County in April 2008 with lots of broadband service in the western and northern parts of the county. Of course, such service is not consistently available in all of the areas ‘Connect West Virginia’ claims, which is another reason why groups like this, well-connected with telecommunications industry players, should not be drawing maps for anyone.

One didn’t need a map to find area residents who agreed with the Peak family’s predicament:

Jim Hoyt said Frontier Communications had made a big effort to provide DSL to its telephone customers in the western end of the county. He wondered why the U.S. 522 Business Park didn’t have DSL.

Angela Petry said a lot of people are working from home and have a need for high-speed internet. It will keep dollars in the county, she said.

Bibi Hahn said one family in their subdivision would spend more time here if they had DSL.

“We need it. We need leadership to get it. We need commissioners and the governor demanding it,” Hahn said.

Getting high-speed broadband internet access throughout the county is the highest priority, said County Administrator Bill Clark.

Broadband was the top issue at the county’s Economic Development Authority summit and is of great importance locally, Clark said.

Clark has been working with all county providers to try and make headway, but it’s just not happening as fast as everyone would like it to, he said.

“It takes infrastructure,” Clark said.

Verizon has expanded its internet presence in the county and Frontier has DSL in some fairly isolated places, he said.

It will take people like last week’s protestors as well as petitions and surveys to get high-speed internet to more county areas, he said.

A new telecommunications committee is also trying to get a handle on the problem, Clark said.

What the Peak family probably didn’t realize is that Verizon was hard at work on a plan of a different kind:  to throw the state of West Virginia, and the Peak family themselves, under the proverbial bus by selling off their operations and getting out of the Mountain State. That’s because Verizon doesn’t consider West Virginia worth the effort to rewire with the advanced fiber network it deploys in other larger states, so why spend millions of dollars when they can let the company that buys those assets deal with it?

On July 2nd, Verizon announced it was going to offer DSL service to another 1,800 lines in Morgan County, expecting to reach parts of the following areas: Route 522, near the Morgan County Business Park; Route 9 East in the River Road and Clone Run Road areas; the Johnsons Mill Road area that includes parts of Highland Ridge, Duckwall, Spriggs and Rupenthal roads; Great Cacapon, including the Maidstone and Cacapon River Meadows communities; Spruce Pine Hollow area, including Chestnut Grove and Spruce Pine Hollow communities, plus parts of Burnt Mill, Potter, Michael’s Chapel and Victory Lane roads; the River Road area, including Sleepy Creek Farms community and parts of Rover, Householder, Crone Lane and Poole roads; parts of Pious Ridge, Culp and River roads; Mountain Run Road area, including New Hope Acres and Deer Run Woods communities, and parts of Mountain Run, Shades Lane, Swaim Lane and Duckwall roads; Winchester Grade Road in the area of Sleepy Creek Forest community and parts of Virginia Line, Highland Ridge, Posey Hollow and Barnes Lane roads; and Spohrs Cross Road area, including areas along Route 9 and parts of Spohrs and Potomac roads.

Verizon’s entry-level DSL service offers speeds of up to 1 Mbps (megabits per second) downstream and 384 Kbps (kilobits per second) upstream. Consumers who want faster speed can order Verizon’s offering of up to 3 Mbps downstream and 768 Kbps upstream.  No guarantee for customers actually achieving those speeds is provided, however.  Providing service at speeds better than that will be up to the new owner of West Virginia’s telecommunications future.

That company will be Frontier Communications, if a deal can be approved by state regulators.

Frontier Communications is aggressive about deploying DSL broadband service to its mostly-rural customers. That’s because broadband is one of the company’s growth areas. Frontier wired telephone line customers are declining as customers switch to competitors or rely on their mobile phone for telephone service. But broadband service is a bright spot for Frontier, as it’s often the only player in town beyond incredibly cumbersome and expensive satellite broadband services in rural areas.

Will Frontier bring DSL to the Peak family and their neighbors if the deal is approved? Almost certainly, eventually. For West Virginia, the question of what kind of broadband service Frontier will provide is an entirely different, but equally important question.

Frontier continues to rely on increasingly dated ADSL standard service across most of its service areas. It’s a technology more than a decade old, with plenty of limitations and little room for growth. Frontier should be willing to provide at least ADSL 2+ service in less populated areas, and either VDSL service or fiber-to-the-home in more populated town and city centers. Both DSL “standards” are improvements over the original, and can often provide substantially faster speeds and room for growth well into the future. It also creates the potential for equity of access for rural and more urban consumers, or at least something approximating it.

In rural areas, standard DSL speeds often don’t exceed 1.5Mbps, and are sometimes even slower. Installation costs can be substantial, along with the monthly subscriber fees, taxes and surcharges, and modem rental costs. The further away one lives from the telephone company central office, the slower and less reliable the service becomes. Some customers living more than 18,000 feet from a central office will not be able to obtain the service at any speed.

Additionally, Frontier Communications continues to define an acceptable amount of residential broadband usage at a paltry 5GB per month. Although the company has not enforced that limitation to date, nothing precludes them from cutting customers off who exceed that minuscule amount of usage, or charge them overlimit penalties and fees for exceeding it down the road. That puts Frontier in a league shared only by wireless data providers like Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility, and Sprint. No other wired provider of note “limits” consumers to that tiny amount of usage. We continue to call on Frontier to delete the entire reference to “5GB” of usage from their Acceptable Use Policy, particularly if the company truly intends not to enforce it.

Should rural residents find themselves with Frontier as their only broadband service provider, the kind of broadband service they will endure, without revolutionary upgrades, could be essentially suspended in time while the rest of the nation marches forward with ever-increasing speeds and potentially lower pricing as a result of competition. It’s a phenomenon known as establishing a “broadband backwater,” where consumers are trapped with sub-standard service with onerous limits, slow speeds, and high pricing with little or no competition.

Although companies like Verizon have the financial resources to rewire even the smallest states with advanced broadband networks, even if they are currently unwilling to do so, smaller providers could find themselves in a reverse position – wanting to deploy advanced networks but lacking the financial capacity to do so.

The unnerving part about all of this is the Obama Administration is set to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to improve and enhance broadband networks, particularly in rural areas across states like West Virginia. Telecommunications companies nationwide are hiring consultants and grant specialists to tailor-write grant applications to receive public funds to build out their broadband networks. It would be a terrific shame if public money went to providers building networks based on yesterday’s technology, with paltry usage limits and high pricing for consumers, with some or most of those costs to construct the networks paid by taxpayers like you and I. That’s having your broadband cake and eating it too.

No telephone company should ever be given public money to construct broadband networks that cannot meet the need for increased speeds and consistent levels of service for every customer, today and in the future, regardless of whether they live in the largest city or a small mountain town in West Virginia. No sales transaction transferring assets from one phone company to another should be granted unless the needs of consumers are given first priority, not the afterthought they were given with some prior deals (FairPoint, Hawaiian Telecom, etc.) No public money should ever be handed over to a broadband provider that wants to establish Internet Overcharging schemes like paltry limits and tiers either, especially in non-competitive areas where consumers have just one choice.

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This article was published originally on ConsumerTel, our new pro-consumer website protecting the interests of telephone company subscribers.

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) has been running a project I have subscribed to for awhile now, called Speed Matters. Today I received this e-mail from them:

What’s next for SpeedMatters? Growing our movement.

Dear Jason,

Time’s up. Pencils down.

How did you do on the SpeedMatters.org speed test?

Believe it or not, you had one of fastest connection speeds in the country – and you’re probably paying a pretty penny for it. The majority of people who took the test didn’t come close to scoring as high as you did.

But fact is, even some of the fastest internet connections in the United States pale in comparison to many of our global competitors like Korea, Sweden, and Japan. These countries have average speeds that are almost ten times faster than the United States — at about 1/12 the cost to the consumer.

FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps has admitted “America’s record in expanding broadband communication is so poor that it should be viewed as an outrage by every consumer and businessperson in the country.”

It’s time to fix this problem, and the first step is determining exactly where our current high speed networks reach — and who is getting left behind.

You’ve already helped us begin to gather this crucial data by testing your Internet speed.

So what’s next? Now you can help grow our movement and educate as many people as possible about the importance of improving our country’s high speed Internet access. That way, when we demand our elected representatives take action, they’ll hear us loud and clear.

Forward the message below to everyone you know, and ask them to join you in getting the U.S. up to speed.

Thank you,

Beth Allen
speedmatters.org Online Mobilization Coordinator

P.S. Don’t forget to sign up for our weekly SpeedMatters.org blog update email to stay up-to-date on the nationwide effort to expand high speed Internet access and the amazing things that people are doing with the improved technology.

Dear Friend,

Americans are charged more for slower internet speeds, and our current high-speed networks don’t even reach millions of households. It’s time for that to change — and you can play a part. Testing your own speed will help make our new community research project, SpeedMatters.org, a success.

We’re falling behind in the global economy because we won’t invest in the technology to bring the benefits of this telecommunications revolution to most of our population. We’re the only industrialized country without a national policy to promote high- speed Internet access.

That’s why you’re getting this email. Testing your connection’s speed now will help us better understand the American average — and craft an effective public policy and awareness campaign.

Take the speed test:

High speed Internet means more than smooth web videos or fast downloads.

Advanced high capacity communications networks can increase democratic and civic participation, improve the delivery of health care, education, job training, public safety and other vital services.

What are we waiting for? It’s time to close the digital divide.

Thanks!

What I found interesting was the quote from FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, “America’s record in expanding broadband communication is so poor that it should be viewed as an outrage by every consumer and businessperson in the country.”

Commissioner Copps is right. It is an outrage. When the rest of the world is moving on average 10 times faster and at 1/12 the cost to consumers, I am a little more then outraged. Speed does matter and I urge you all to join and spread the word about Speedmatters.org.  They have a lot of useful information at their site, including speed by state and listing of broadband initiatives.

I took the speed test here in Greensboro, North Carolina, using Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner Turbo and my results were 11.114Mbps download and 4.85Mbps upload.  What is your speed?

I know here in Greensboro, the CWA had tried to to unionize the local Time Warner Cable workers and the company pushed back and won. Now a lot of those same TWC employees have been pink slipped in favor of non-union contract workers or demoted to lesser positions with less pay. I am sure this isn’t the only city this is happening in.  Just goes to show that TWC isn’t just effecting your families with their greed, but their own workers’ families too.

The only downside to this organization I see is that they have a partnership with Connected Nation, which is the cable/telecom industries mapping group.  I would urge the good folks at the CWA to tread lightly with Connected Nation.  They are Time Warner, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and the other companies in disguise.  They have their own interests at heart.  This is what Connected Nation is doing here in North Carolina.

Verizon has announced a deal with the city of Pittsburgh to begin rolling out FiOS services to city residents by the end of this summer.

This gives the city its first wired competitor to incumbent cable provider Comcast, whose franchise renewal is due at the end of this year.

Verizon FiOS will charge residents $47 per month for 250 standard definition channels plus local high definition channels, and $11 more for several dozen HD channels and more than a dozen sports networks.

Some suburban Pittsburgh customers can already access FiOS broadband products, as the company has wired parts of Banksville, Beechview, Bloomfield, Brookline, Carrick, East Hills, East Liberty, Friendship, Garfield, Highland Park, Homewood, Larimer, Lincoln-Lemington, Morningside, Overbrook, Point Breeze, Regent Square, Stanton Heights and Swisshelm Park.  Completing agreements to send video down the network to add a “cable TV” type service is expected to be a relatively simple process, according to Verizon officials.

[flv width=”428″ height=”240″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WTAE Pittsburgh FIOS Arrives in Pittsburgh 7-6-09.flv[/flv]

WTAE Pittsburgh Reports on Verizon Agreement with the City of Pittsburgh

City residents can expect to see service available within the next six years, or the company will be subjected to fines by city officials.  But Verizon should have service available far earlier, starting with most of the North Side, some South Hills neighborhoods near suburbs, the business district downtown, and parts of Lawrenceville.

In return for a franchise agreement, Verizon will mimic Comcast’s agreement with the city, handing over 5% of gross revenue.  Verizon has also agreed to install dedicated fiber optic service between some city public safety buildings, $700,000 to upgrade the city’s video equipment, in part for local government proceedings, and 52 cents from each customer will be designated towards providing the viewer with public, educational, and local government channels.  A total of five channels will be reserved: two for government, one for public access, one for educational use, and a fifth reserved for the future.

More video on this story below.

… Continue Reading

The price of providing lousy telephone and broadband Internet service in three New England states?  $2.8 million dollars in fines, and counting.

FairPoint Communications has been piling up fines and penalties for almost a year now, providing third world phone service with the competitive spirit of Hugo Chavez.  Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont officials started fining the company after it blasted FairPoint’s “failure to meet certain standards for quality and timeliness of interconnections.”  FairPoint is required by law to open its networks to local competitors, and the results of those trying to purchase access at wholesale rates have been about as acceptable as those residential customers have dealt with since Verizon threw them under the bus and left town more than a year ago.

The company’s response?  It wants Maine’s Public Utilities Commission, for one, to waive the $845,000 it owes to local phone carriers.  In a filing with the PUC, it asks that waiving or modifying the payments will let it return its focus to fixing faulty networks to normal operating levels.

In other words, it was penalized for not doing its job and promises, if the penalties go away, it will do its job.  What happens if the penalties don’t go away?

FairPoint’s plans for broadband expansion in its service area were called into question when the company announced it has the potential to go bankrupt if bondholders don’t agree to waive certain payment requirements.