[T]he state Public Utility Commission has set deadlines of Friday and Tuesday for lawyers to file arguments on whether Vermont’s largest landline phone company should be required to reconnect the troubled cellular phone company CoverageCo despite more than $100,000 of unpaid bills.
The deadlines – legal briefs by Friday and reply briefs four days later – were set after a four-hour emergency hearing Tuesday in which CoverageCo attorney David Mullett said the decision by Consolidated Communications to shut off CoverageCo had cut off 911 emergency calling service from portions of the state.
Some of the arguments at Tuesday’s hearing centered on how much weight should be given to the public safety implications of the 911 issue — Consolidated lawyer Debra Bouffard called it “a bit of a red herring” – and whether the commission even has jurisdiction over areas it doesn’t traditionally regulate, including wireless phone service and wholesale internet hookups.
CoverageCo in 2012 signed a contract with a now defunct state entity, the Vermont Telecommunications Authority, to provide cellular phone service to parts of rural Vermont that had no coverage, by installing microcell boosters along rural travel corridors. The telecommunications authority’s role was later taken over by the Public Service Department.
Testimony at Tuesday’s hearing revealed CoverageCo’s financial woes include unpaid bills running to more than $100,000 owed to FairPoint Communications from before and after CoverageCo took over FairPoint service territory in northern New England last year. CoverageCo is in arrears with other vendors as well. FairPoint was recently bought by Consolidated Communications.
One state official on Wednesday, who said he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, said CoverageCo had been losing money for awhile, but had been helped until last fall by a Massachusetts investor, Vanu Bose, the wealthy son of the founder of the Framingham, Massachusetts-based audio equipment maker Bose Corp. The younger Bose died unexpectedly in November, at 52, severely hurting CoverageCo’s prospects, the official said.
CoverageCo’s M.O. has been to allow cellphone subscribers — to a number of carriers — to connect through its microcells to the Consolidated Communications landline network, which in turn moves them onto the networks of the customers’ carriers. Mullett, the CoverageCo attorney, argued that if the company cannot connect with the Consolidated landline network, CoverageCo is effectively out of business, unable to generate the revenue to pay what it owes to Consolidated, in order to be reconnected.
Consolidated executive Sarah Davis said FairPoint and Consolidated had been strung along by CoverageCo for more than a year. After repeated requests for CoverageCo to produce a plan, showing how it would catch up on arrearages, when no plan was produced, the decision was made to cut CoverageCo off.
On May 22, Davis said, Consolidated received a letter from the president and CEO of Trilogy Networks, which said the company had stepped in a week earlier to help stabilize CoverageCo. The letter offered a full payment for May and made a promise of future payments, but made no mention of catching up on past, overdue bills, Davis said.
Trilogy CEO George Woodward wrote, “I’m asking you for your help in restoring and maintaining (CoverageCo) service to the citizens of Vermont in return for our regular and timely monthly service payments that began last Friday May 18, 2018.”
Commission Chairman Anthony Roisman asked Davis, “You’ve not seen a firm plan for payment of arrearages?”
Davis answered, “That’s right. … They didn’t follow through on what they committed to us, and they took a different tack.”
One question that got ample attention Tuesday was how much weight to give CoverageCo’s role as a promoter of public safety though its provision of 911 emergency calling service.
Bouffard, the Burlington lawyer representing Consolidated, argued that even if CoverageCo’s microcells were up and running throughout its network, there still would be significant areas of the state without cellular coverage or the ability to call 911. “The public safety issue is a bit of a red herring,” she said.
Vermont may want expanded cellphone and 911 coverage, she said, but that’s a public policy and budget discussion for the Legislature, not something the commission can impose on Consolidated, she said.
“Effectively what they’re asking for here is for an order that would ask Consolidated to subsidize a public policy decision, and the commission respectfully doesn’t have the authority to do it.”
