FairPoint Communications has agreed to new protocols for tracking and responding to service outages aimed at reducing the current backlog, according to the Vermont Department of Public Service.
The department has received more than 700 complaints about FairPoint’s service since many of its workers walked off the job Oct. 17. That’s more than eight times the number of complaints from the same period last year, according to department officials. There are close to 1,700 FairPoint workers on strike across New England.
Earlier this month, complications from a winter storm led to an outage of Vermont’s Emergency 911 system.
Gov. Peter Shumlin and Vermont’s congressional delegation have urged FairPoint CEO Paul Sunu to restart negotiations with the striking workers. But Sunu responded that workers’ demands are what’s making it difficult for the company to provide its service — a challenge exacerbated in recent weeks by poor weather.
However, DPS concerns about FairPoint’s responsiveness to service requests predate the work stoppage, and the Public Service Board recently agreed to investigate the issue.
A FairPoint spokeswoman did not respond to questions for this report.
The new protocols require FairPoint to track and report outages that last seven days or more, DPS Commissioner Chris Recchia said in an interview Monday. It has also agreed to prioritize outages for people who do not have cellular service.
The company also made a preliminary pledge to double the number of crews working to restore Internet and phone service for customers in Vermont, Recchia said.
“It’s not a commitment, necessarily, but it’s an idea they had proposed,” he said, adding that DPS planned to follow up with FairPoint on its staffing levels.
Recchia did not know how many people FairPoint has working in Vermont, but it’s clearly not enough, he said, given the number of complaints and the wait times customers are experiencing before service is restored.
Before the strike, FairPoint had 100 field workers in Vermont. Today they deploy around 115, with more contractors on their way, according CEO Sunu’s letter.
“Whatever level of staffing it takes to get this back under control, that’s what we expect them to do,” he said, “They’re out of time. They need to be making substantial progress every day.”
DPS is not able to measure the number of FairPoint customers without service, beyond the barometer provided by complaints. It’s also unclear to what extent FairPoint is monitoring its outages.
“They’re so concentrated on trying to deal with the backlog they have that they’re probably not calculating this daily, but that’s one of the things we’ve asked them to do,” said Jim Porter, director of telecommunications for DPS.
FairPoint has close to 200,000 customers in Vermont, and for roughly 10 percent of those customers, or 20,000 homes, the company is their only option for phone service, according to Recchia.
FairPoint customer Fletcher Dean, 61, of East Calais is one of those.
“Whenever they hang up with me at the dispatch center they say ‘thank you for choosing FairPoint,’ and I tell them I didn’t choose FairPoint, you guys essentially have a monopoly in my area,” Dean said in an interview Monday.
Dean lost service Dec. 11, following a winter storm the day before. His home uses solar energy and isn’t reliant on the grid for power, but a tree in the area knocked out his landline phone service, he said.
When he first called FairPoint to make a service complaint, they said his request would be prioritized, and a technician would be there by Dec. 17, the following Wednesday.
It was the following Saturday when he received a “garbled” phone call, during which the caller said something about FairPoint, Dean recalled. He figured that meant a FairPoint worker was on the road by his house where the tree went down.
There was no FairPoint worker when he went to check. The phone line was still on the ground, but someone had spliced the connection together and the line was affixed to the pole with electrical tape, Dean said.
“I thought I might be in the twilight zone,” he said, recalling the jerry-rigged solution. “It’s the farthest thing from a professional repair that I’ve ever seen. It looks almost like something that, with a little more skill, I could have done myself.”
Many of his neighbors are still without service, Dean said, and he believes the strike is “undoubtedly” impacting FairPoint’s ability to restore people’s service.
The fix itself was troubling, but more concerning to Dean was that the technician had not bothered to ask if that was the extent of his problem, which it was not. Another tree further down the road was cracked and leaning against the phone line, threatening to knock his services out again at any moment. When he called FairPoint, they told him his “ticket” was closed, and he could request that a new one be opened.
Dean said he’s pleased to have service, but he’s disappointed in the “shoddiness” of the repair and that no one inquired if there were other issues.
In the past, it’s taken FairPoint as long as a week to fix an outage, even when weather isn’t a factor, but a typical response time, according to Dean, was one or two days.
“If this is what we have to expect, for repairs to take a week or more, I think the company should be embarrassed to be in business,” he said.
