Vermont PSB Investigation of FairPoint Service Quality Continues Post-Strike
The Vermont Public Service Board investigation of FairPoint Communications’ service quality is still in the fact-gathering stage and is unlikely to be affected by the recent end of a strike of more than 1,700 of the telco’s workers in northern New England, state officials said in interviews. The more than 1,700 FairPoint workers in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont who had been on strike since October returned to work Feb. 25 after the telco reached an agreement with local chapters of the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (see 1502190035). The PSB began its investigation in December because of elevated numbers of consumer complaints, with the number of complaints spiking after the strike began. The investigation began after a Nov. 28 outage that led to multiple failures to connect 911 calls to state public safety answering points (see 1412050055).
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The Vermont Department of Public Service has found that FairPoint substantially decreased its backlog of wireline repairs throughout January, after a spike in backlogged repairs in December, said DPS Telecom Division Director Jim Porter. That improvement and the end of the strike won’t affect how DPS and PSB handle the service quality investigation, he said. “We’re certainly glad everyone’s back to work, but we don’t expect” the end of the strike will affect the investigation, he said. DPS was concerned about FairPoint’s service quality in Vermont before October, because the number of complaints against the telco was already far higher than normal for Vermont before the strike began, Porter said. The Maine Public Utilities Commission is also investigating FairPoint’s service quality after the telco noted in a report on its Q4 response rates in that state that 90 percent of its wireline outages in Maine took longer than 24 hours to respond to in November, while 86 percent of outages in December took more than 24 hours to resolve. FairPoint didn’t comment.
Discovery requests and testimony filings to the PSB are expected to continue into June, with testimony by non-FairPoint stakeholders due March 15. Technical hearings on the investigation are set for the week of June 29, the PSB said. “None of these proceedings are exactly speedy,” since it takes time to complete the investigation, Porter said. Vermont E911 Board Executive Director David Tucker said he believes the investigation will continue to be thorough. It hasn’t even progressed to the point where the PSB will ask him to raise the E911 Board’s concerns about FairPoint’s delays in supplying the board with the callback numbers of people whose 911 calls didn’t reach PSAPs during the Nov. 28 outage, he said. “We’ll have that conversation” at some point before the technical hearings, Tucker said. The E911 Board chose to become an intervener in the PSB investigation rather than duplicate that investigation with its own investigation, he said.
FairPoint’s ongoing financial difficulties have been a factor in the PSB’s investigation, Porter said. It’s “an interesting process trying to balance adequate service quality with a company that’s continuing to lose revenue at somewhat of an alarming rate,” he said. FairPoint said Wednesday that it lost a net $43.6 million in Q4. CEO Paul Sunu cited the New England strike “and the challenges of extraordinarily bad weather” in that region as the main factors in the loss. “We saw a decline in our revenues from lack of new service requests arising in part from our decision to curtail marketing in advance of the strike,” he said in a news release. “That impact is most noticeable in our new requests for high speed Internet service. We also experienced longer installation timelines that created a backlog for connecting new services, which remained as we entered” Q1.