[F]airPoint Communications officials say severe weather contributed to the company’s low service-quality ratings going back to 2013.
The company says it is not doing anything wrong with regard to its refund policy.
That’s according to Public Service Board testimony FairPoint executives filed on April 15 as part of an ongoing service-quality investigation.
The Department of Public Service, which advocates for the public interest before the PSB, said last month that FairPoint owed money to at least 10,611 customers for service outages. That number did not include “an additional universe” of people who the department said never bothered to call FairPoint after losing service for at least 24 hours.
The department argued that since the outage numbers came from the company’s service-quality reports, FairPoint was well aware of the outages, and has been violating a PSB rule by not crediting those customers automatically.
FairPoint’s Vermont state president Beth Fastiggi argued this month that the company “cannot through reasonable efforts identify the specific customers that are entitled to a credit” and characterized 24-plus-hour outages as “rare instances.”
Richard Murtha, FairPoint’s vice president of installation and maintenance, said an ice storm in December 2013 and a series of heavy rainstorms in the summer of 2014 meant repairs took longer than expected, so outages lasted more than 24 hours.
Further, Fastiggi wrote that the department is becoming cumbersome in terms of its regulatory power. FairPoint deals with competition from AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast, and the Department of Public Service oversight has become burdensome, she said.
“Service quality is governed by competitive forces, and a monopoly era surrogate applicable only to FairPoint and other landline providers is unnecessary and inappropriate,” Fastiggi wrote.
Fastiggi said the company has only missed one of nine performance metrics, and not putting the company’s performance into context of its competition “can lead to customers’ perception that FairPoint has ‘substandard service quality.’”
“For the many customers that subscribe to two or more voice services, it is much less important for one of those services to be repaired in 24 hours,” she added. “FairPoint has already agreed to prioritize out-of-service voice repairs for customers who do not have a voice alternative and understands that this is an important concern.”
According to PSB documents from Feb. 27 obtained in a public records request, there were 1,076 “troubles” in 2014 reported by FairPoint customers who require landline phone service for medical reasons.
The company told the PSB that the only way to know if a customer with the outage is under the “medical” category is if the person mentions it when they call to report an issue.
Jim Porter, senior policy and telecommunications director for the Department of Public Service, said Maine and New Hampshire have deregulated FairPoint to some degree, but said deregulation wouldn’t help the company serve Vermonters.
“I think the department and the board have given FairPoint as much regulatory flexibility as possible, and I do not believe that their regulatory obligations are the cause of their problem,” Porter said.
The company’s stock is trading at a three-year high, but FairPoint’s financial statements show the company has had negative net income since 2012.
Despite pouring $1 million per week into landline infrastructure updates in Northern New England, total assets on FairPoint’s company-wide balance sheets have been declining since 2010.
Investors want the company to prepare for a sale, according to The Associated Press.
The PSB investigation will continue through September.
