Fairpoint Communications owner Consolidated Communications says the company is killing off the Fairpoint brand and launching new efforts to shore up the ISP's lagging broadband offerings. Fairpoint has had a long, winding road--having acquired Verizon's unwanted New England broadband footprint (2007)--then filing for bankruptcy (2009) after it struggled to overcome the deal's debt load. During that period the ISP's users were shoveled from an owner that didn't care about them, to one without the funds or competency to do much better.

The company says existing Fairpoint users shouldn't have to change their existing Fairpoint e-mail addresses. It also insists that the company is "well on its way to significantly boosting broadband speeds across its Northern New England service area," and will also soon offer improved VOIP and home security services.

"Today, we launch the Consolidated Communications brand to reflect a new day and our commitment to deliver best-in-class services to our customers," Consolidated CEO Bob Udell said in a statement.

"We are committed to making this transition a seamless experience for customers," the CEO added. "Since closing on the acquisition last July, we’ve made great progress on many initiatives to upgrade broadband platforms and make it easier for customers to do business with us by delivering new and enhanced products and self-service tools. This is also an exciting time for our employees as we join together as one team with greater scale and resources to ultimately deliver a better experience to our customers."

Consolidated Communications has announced a $1.5 billion deal to acquire New England broadband ISP Fairpoint Communications. Fairpoint Communications has struggled ever since it bought Verizon's unwanted DSL and phone networks in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine back in 2007 for $2.7 billion.

Last week we noted how Fairpoint had begun adding a new $3 per month "broadband cost recovery fee." According to the company's website, the fee is necessary "to defray costs associated with expanding network capacity to support the continued increase in customers' broadband consumption." Except users were quick to point out that this is what your overall bill is for, and that the fee is just another attempt to misleadingly raise the advertised rate post sale.

I talked a little bit to Vermont Public Radio this week about the fee.

If there's one problem with the broadband industry that regulators simply refuse to even acknowledge, it's the use of misleading below the line fees to jack up the advertised cost of service. Inspired by the banking industry, countless ISPs now happily make up a wide variety of nonsensical fees they bury below the line for this purpose, ranging from the growing use of "broadcast TV fees" (used to bury a portion of programming costs below the line), to CenturyLink's implementation of the completely made up "Internet Cost Recovery Fee."

The end result is broadband consumers who think they're getting service at a particular rate, only to be shocked when the bill finally comes due.

Fairpoint Communications says that the company is deploying a new suite of speed upgrades that should deliver speeds up to 25 Mbps to 13 additional communities. According to the company's announcement, Fairpoint upgraded the technology at central offices in Brownville, Bucksport, Columbia, Danforth, Dixfield, Frenchville, Guilford, Lubec, Madison, Monson, Skowhegan, Waldoboro and Wells.

Maglan Capital LP, one of the largest and longest term shareholders of FairPoint Communications sent a letter to the company this week urging the company to sell itself. According to Maglan, while FairPoint "has made enormous strides" operationally, the company's "stock trades at a significant discount to its peers" and the company has failed to maximize shareholder value.

Second-tier telco executives have spent the last few weeks trying to calm investors nervous about the fact that the company's network may not keep pace with looming cable DOCSIS 3.1 upgrades. Cable is pushing toward 10 Gbps down and 1 Gbps upstream with the new relatively-inexpensive standard, leaving phone companies like Fairpoint -- whose DSL services are already well-behind on speed -- only further behind.

Fairpoint is the latest ISP to enter the gigabit speed race, the company announcing a limited fiber to the home deployment in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. According to the company's press release, this is the first time the company has deployed gigabit speeds anywhere in its footprint.

According to Fairpoint, the gigabit service will be "available for a limited time" at promotional prices starting at $84.99 per month for consumers and $146 per month for businesses.

"Our fiber-to-the-premise gigabit Internet service rollout demonstrates our commitment to leveraging our extensive fiber network and dense metro Ethernet backbone in response to growing customer demand for higher speed services," Fairpoint lauds itself in a statement.

Of course like most gigabit deployments these days actually availability appears very limited in scope, usually reserved for higher-end housing developments where fiber was already in the ground and deployment costs were negligible. Indeed, the press release notes that only "select addresses" will qualify for service, with future limited deployments planned for Greenland, New Castle, Newington, Rye, and Stratham New Hampshire starting in December.

It's unclear however just how selective Fairpoint is being, since many of these areas were already wired for Verizon FiOS before the territories were acquired by Fairpoint.

Fairpoint Communications has announced the company is laying off around 260 workers across the seventeen states in which the company operates. "Access lines and legacy revenues are in secular decline, and we are taking these steps to ensure our administrative and operational structures remain aligned with the current size and composition of our business," Fairpoiint CEO Paul H.