Our friend DCE from Weekend Pundit also has a more local blog One Voice in Gilford (hmmm, trying to muscle in on the baby ‘Grok??? ) for things that are more germaine to the local area. He’s got a post up concerning his thoughts about FairPoint Communications and how well (or not) things have been going since Verizon sold all their landlines in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine to FairPoint:
FairPoint Feeling The Heat
And the hits keep on coming!FairPoint Communications is in the crosshairs again, with rising customer complaints, poor customer service, billing problems, and a host of other issues that have driven over 80,000 customers away from the company. As an editorial in the Laconia Citizen asks, can FairPoint survive its mis-steps?
Concerns over customer service woes at FairPoint have been in the public’s sights for two months, and pressure has increased for the communications provider to address them. Particularly nettlesome to the company and its customers have been the operation of the company’s call centers, the billing process and how it handles orders.
Earlier this year, an international credit rating agency lowered its outlook for FairPoint from stable to negative because it lost an unexpected number of access lines and customers. Reports in January had the company shedding 80,000 customers since buying Verizon’s assets in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.
Today, it seems fleeing customers remain the rule and not the exception.
…The transfer took place despite the lingering doubts of many observers and some regulators.
I was one of them, as you’ve seen from earlier posts I made on the subject.
…The consumers in northern New England were sold a bill of goods. FairPoint hasn’t delivered as promised, is suffering from falling revenue, has a bad PR problem, and a debt load that would make some Third World nations take a pass.
This isn’t going to end well.
To tell you the truth, DCE and I had some "discussions" concerning the sale – I held that being a private company, Verizon should have the right to sell whatever it owned to whomever they wished. He, of course, took the tack of "No, as we the ratepayers are going to get screwed".
Well, I was right (philosophically) and the sale went through. DCE was right, as we are in the state of being he described.
One of the big disruptive technologies to the old style telephone biz has been the cell phone – Verizon correctly read the tea leaves and FairPoint has turned the rest of us into suckers. I have maintained that having a landline was helpful during long term power outages as the lines are fed from the central offices batteries.
Well, I’ve changed my mine. Both Sprint and Verizon Wireless have "Network Extenders" that basically act as cell towers but for the home. Sprint charges $100 for the unit and then $5 – $10 / month for access. Verizon charges $249 period. Both plug into your broadband router and then have your cell phones act like VOIP phones.
I have Verizon Wireless but I’m not going for the deal….yet. With Sprint, that monthly charge allows unlimited minutes through the N.E. Verizon Wireless won’t go there yet.
They do? Ta-ta to FairPoint (I’m tired of the bad cable outside of the house they won’t fix and tired of writing manual checks – can’t pay online).
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