FairPoint Extends Cutover, Again

"Gene Johnson, chairman and CEO of FairPoint stated, "Tremendous progress has been made over the past several months toward the successful completion of this extremely complex project"."

While tremendous progress may have been made over recent months, I just spent another several days with no usable fiber signal. The HSI went out first, and the phones finally followed.

Dropped connections and dropped calls are a new (and a uniquely FairPoint) phenomenon for us... I would think with all of the money being paid to Verizon, the service could be maintained as well as it always was.

It seems questionable if this company can meet any of the benchmarks that they promised the northern New England consumers.

They are having a lot of problems getting their own software setup to support their internal operations. I can just imagine the spagetti code and myriad of sytems Verizon had built up over the years.

I bet the vendors that Fairpoint contracted are just scratching their heads at all the problems they are running into.

Is it fair to state that when Verizon was in charge, things more or less just worked? If that's the case, then why is it that Verizon could keep the phones working but FairPoint can't?

It's fair. I think the problem is that Fairpont is trying to re-create many legacy sytems that Verizon was doing, and it's a lot hard than they thought it would be.

Sounds like the classic newbie engineer's mistake.

I'll never forget learning the tried-and-true "it was done this way for a reason" lesson.

What I don't get is outside of rebranding assets, what more would FairPoint need to actually do given that Verizon sold them a working network.

I would expect that you are correct, and that FairPoint has far more than they can handle.

The whole blame doesn't go in either direction, but it is discouraging when you, as a consumer, call a carrier- FairPoint in this case- and the response is, "Fiber? We do not have residential fiber."

The chaos that fiber customers are facing is absurd- FairPoint wants the consumer to call the Verizon Fiber Solutions Center (in my case in MA or RI)- and Verizon doesn't want to deal with you, because you are not their customer.

In Verizon's defense, they can no longer see my account in their system, so it's a mess.

It is on FairPoint's head to fix this... they claim that they own my service, but they don't respond to calls well, do not call back when they say that they will, and do not make the follow-up calls to assure that service has been restored.

As my other half is on-call at night for the local hospital and we are cell dead here, I expect a resolution, and don't see that it is unreasonable to expect that the phones work. Never had a Verizon phone problem. Never had the HSI out either, for that matter...

Sounds like FairPoint may have picked up a little of Verizon's customer support problems along the way :-x

re: "In Verizon's defense, they can no longer see my account in their system, so it's a mess."

That's funny, I'm getting a Fairpoint bill now and I can still manage my account through Verizon.com or Verizon.net. Verizon is even trying to sell me services that were free when they first sold me on DSL... things like roaming remote dialup and "premium tech support" have been stripped from my package without notice, and must now be purchased separately (for a stiff monthly fee). I've also been told that technically Verizon did not sell anything to Fairpoint, despite what they say in the papers. Apparently, what really happened is that they MERGED with Verizon: Verizon shareholders got Fairpoint stock, and Fairpoint shareholders got Verizon stock. So I guess you could say that Fairpoint -IS- Verizon, to the extent that the people who own Verizon now own Fairpoint. Bad choice of name too, I suppose... on the street it will undoubtedly be known as UNFAIRpoint.

According to some, this whole thing was just a shell game designed to excuse Verizon from complying with some regulatory provisions which apply to monopolies of a certain size. Another aspect of the deal is that small states were pressuring Verizon to provide DSL to rural areas in response to widespread public complaints and they did not want to do this. In the long run, that might be a blessing though: maybe some new, super efficient ultrawideband technologies will come along and supersede the existing broadband monopolies. Some of the state legislators are pushing for 100% statewide cellular internet coverage, but evidence is mounting that cell phone and cell tower radiation is a significant long-term health hazard. I don't want to be part of some grand high-power microwave experiment: cellular internet performance sucks, but boosting the power even more just to make it approach the speed of entry level DSL will be worse. I sure hope another reasonably-priced (and safe) terrestrial option emerges... heck, I moved here to get AWAY from the cell towers and now they want to put them everywhere. And the same people who whine about windmills seem to think that's okay.

A News story about Fair Point. So it is possible for BBR to write a news story with out bashing the ISP.

Whats funny is I live In Maine and I had to call Fair Point after reading this on this site. Fair Point said that they hadn't heard anything about having to delay it again. And that my source must have been wrong. Then tonight on the WABI TV5 CBS news they said the same thing as this artical said.