 
SteveCon
IBEW 2222 Boston, MA
Premium
join:2004-09-02
Burlington, MA
 ·Verizon FIOS
| Hold on to your hat.. This deal was just wrong from the "get go" and it's been a bumpy ride the whole way. I have suspicions that the worst is not behind us yet. Breaking promises to customers (and employees for that matter) at this stage of the game is not the direction Fairpoint should be headed, as is only erodes confidence.
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The Labor Movement - those wonderful folks that brought you the weekend! | |
|  | shit
join:2003-07-14
Skowhegan, ME | Re: Hold on to your hat.. Good thing I have VOIP from the cable company! | |
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tileguy
Premium
join:2007-08-09
Derry, NH
| Re: Hold on to your hat.. Also a residential customer in NH and my FIOS speed was dropped from 20/2 to 15/2 with no price change. Was really hoping for TV but thats not happening............
All in all I'm lucky to have the fiber but was hoping for a bit more. Now we'll most likely see less with Fairpoint.  | |
| | | | Ytsejamer1
join:2008-01-18
Somersworth, NH
| Re: Hold on to your hat.. b*stard...i would love to have any fiber connection available. Unfortunately I'm stuck without...and DSL around here isn't reliable enough according to some of my neighbors. they indicate it's slower than advertised.
I doubt there will be any improvements and we'll have to wait until who knows when... *sigh* | |
| cyclone_z
join:2006-06-19
Ames, IA | it says mississippi not minnesota in the linked article it says mississippi not minnesota in the linked article | |
| 
pnh102
Reptiles Are Cuddly And Pretty
Premium
join:2002-05-02
Mount Airy, MD
 ·Comcast
| Are Things Resolved? quote:
... unions were concerned that the telco wouldn't keep its promise to improve service, add jobs and broaden access to high speed internet. ... The company laid off 56 employees who worked on their legacy networks, though they hired almost 1,000 for the New England transition.
Well there were some issues with 911, but if Fairpoint expanded high speed internet service, then I would say there's no real problem given that "they hired almost 1,000 ..."
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Blagojevich / Madoff 2012! | |
| |
SteveCon
IBEW 2222 Boston, MA
Premium
join:2004-09-02
Burlington, MA | Re: Are Things Resolved? So it's just a "little lie" and that makes it ok?? How big does the number have to grow before you're outraged? | |
| | |
pnh102
Reptiles Are Cuddly And Pretty
Premium
join:2002-05-02
Mount Airy, MD
·Comcast
| Re: Are Things Resolved? said by SteveCon  :So it's just a "little lie" and that makes it ok?? How big does the number have to grow before you're outraged? Where was the lie?
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Blagojevich / Madoff 2012! | |
| | | |
SteveCon
IBEW 2222 Boston, MA
Premium
join:2004-09-02
Burlington, MA
·Verizon FIOS
| Re: Are Things Resolved? The one where they told everyone that would listen that they'd be hiring (no mention of layoffs). You maintained that the 1000 hires (your numbers) negates the 56 jobs lost. They are lying by omission.
How many jobs lost would make a difference, 100? 200? 1000? | |
| | | | | cmaenginsb
Premium,MVM
join:2001-03-19
Palmdale, CA
| Re: Are Things Resolved? said by SteveCon :The one where they told everyone that would listen that they'd be hiring (no mention of layoffs). You maintained that the 1000 hires (your numbers) negates the 56 jobs lost. They are lying by omission. How many jobs lost would make a difference, 100? 200? 1000? Actually the 1000 "new" jobs were not "his numbers", they come from the last line of the posting.
Assuming the 1000 "new" jobs were actually created then 1000-56= 944. As to lying by omission maybe that only appears to be true by the same union logic coming from the linked WCAX article. The "dozens" add up to 34 jobs and the jobs were never done by the union or within Verizon in the first place. The end result, nothing changes but a net positive of 944 jobs (if you believe they added 1000 jobs which I don't based on the numbers from otter below).
Personally I don't know why the legacy folks weren't given the opportunity to crosstrain and keep their jobs, unless the pay between what they were getting and what they would get given their experience in the other department would be less. | |
| Dolgan
Premium
join:2005-10-01
Sun Prairie, WI | Just like Hawaiiam Telecom Fairpoint will end up like Hawaiian Tel, who is on the verge of bankruptcy within 2 years of taking over from Verizon. The deals were great for Verizon and its shareholders...just not working out too well for the purchasers {so far}. | |
| Sammer
join:2005-12-22
Canonsburg, PA | Unless Congress votes to delay it until June 12 | |
| 
otter
@rr.com
| 1000 New Jobs??? Good grief - sorry about math in last post - here's how it should have read.
Fairpoint started with 900 employees last year - bought 3000 from Verizon - claim to have hired 1000 new folks - which would bring the total to 4900 as of today. Their website says they have about 3975 employees - which is ABOUT 1000 off. They say they are looking for 600 more employees - (mostly temps by the by) - so maybe they are counting as of yet unhired employees in the 1000 figure. Regardless - if Foulpoint speaks or prints - they are distorting something somewhere. I have watched this company for 10 years now - and have yet to see them come near telling the truth. | |
| | 
karlmarx
join:2006-09-18
iraq
 ·Fairpoint Communic..
| Re: 1000 New Jobs??? Of course they are lying. I just checked their web site, and they have 'maybe' 20 positions open. I know for a FACT they have hired less than 200 new people, and the vast majority of them are low level help desk. Fairpoint just doesn't have the capital to expand, they have a huge amount of debt, and they have a VERY expensive footprint to cover. No wonder verizon wanted to bail on the entire thing. Fairpoint, like Hawaii telelcom, is going to be broke within 2 years. God help us all, especially those of us who have FIOS.
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The happiest countries are the most secular. The struggle AGAINST corporations is the struggle FOR humanity! | |
| 
hawk82
join:2001-04-26
Oakland, ME
·Verizon Online DSL
·RoadRunner Cable
| back to work soon I hope A CLEC I do contract work for has had all of their workorders put into Fairpoint on hold while this transition goes on. So I haven't had any new installs in a couple weeks. Would be nice to get back to work, although I'll most likely get dumped on with a ton of work to get caught back up. | |
| qworster
join:2001-11-25
Los Angeles, CA
3 edits | It's NOT a GREATport, not a Goodport.... Only a Fairport....
and they'll probably wind up a Poorport...
I gusss that about says it all, doesn't it? | |
|
cgny09
@taconic.net
| fairpoint sucks. fairpoint is a company that doesnt care about its customers and lies about everything they do. they told my mom that our dsl would remain active even though we were cancelling our home phone [moving to cell only] and it would be $5 more per month. this was no big deal. two weeks after we ported the home number, the dsl stops working. they shut our dsl off! then they realized the mistake and it took them more then a week to get it back on b/c they had unplugged our line from the dsl port in the central office. then the lady tells us that the price of dsl only is $75.00 for 768/256. wtf??? its only because verizon put cell towers here and everyone is going cell only so they are jacking dsl up so that everyone keeps their home phone.
fairpoint will go bankrupt and verizon will buy them out. it was all in verizons big plans of things. [verizon sells new england landlines to fairpoint, fairpoint expands dsl coverage & invests millions, fairpoint goes bankrupt, verizon buys fairpoint for pennies on the dollar.] VZ is not dumb.
charter is also going to go bankrupt. they are going to be bought by time warner. i live in a charter service area. there has been an increasing # of time warner trucks here [time warner doesnt serve any town near me, closest town is 20 miles away.] i asked the tw guy why he was checking the cable lines out in a charter service area [we're just looking at some things.] which hints to me that time warner is looking to buy charter and they are inspecting the cable network. idk but it seems like thats the case. | |
| crazyandy
join:2009-02-01
Walpole, MA
| Fairpoint CANNOT be worse then verizon Since Verizon owns a large piece of fairpoint, you cannot expect good service, quality technicians or reliable DSL or phone service. i am a masshole, and see how verizon works down here. how many techs out there have been waiting for a verizon tech on a site, and had to go wake him up in his truck? even for my home, i ordered fios, was told it would take 3 weeks. when the tech showed up, he sat in his truck for an hour, then left. never returned. after calling and complaining to verizon, they said the next availability was in 3 more weeks. so i cancelled my dsl and voice service from them. they decided to keep charging me for 6 more months. at tooks months to get half the money back. I dont see how it would be possible fairpoint can be any worse. Verizon workers may be they laziest people i have ever worked with. If fairpoint being a smaller company operates anything like verizon, they will not be in business long.
Good luck to you all. | |
|
ed
@myfairpoint.net
| fairpoint is clueless we are two days into the Fairpoint "transition" in Maine
I have lost email service,cant contact anyone who knows anything and Fairpoint doesnt answer any phone calls
wait till I do get someone on the phone
they can have my hard line and there shitty DSL
I have had enough
VONAGE IS THE ANSWER
I hope they go out of business | |
|
Fairpoint Sucks
@comcast.net
| Fairpoint Sucks They have laid off a lot more than 56 employees this year. Now they aren't even able to honor the severance packages. The recently laid off workers have not even received their final pay checks. I wonder how long before we are bailing out this corporation? | |
|
customer2020
|  They only changed the label
Living with Verizon was hell: they repeatedly changed our internet service tier to a lower speed but continued to bill us for the faster service without notification. We were forced to tolerate hourly network outages for months because they refused to believe that an intermittent DSL carrier was due to a fault in their equipment. Instead of sending out a repair tech, they just argued with us for months until they were finally proven wrong by a network engineer. Then they swapped our main voice number with another customer. For all that we had to put up with, we never even got so much as an apology. Even worse, they offered new customers a lower rate than we were paying. And that's the short version of this tale of misery: I won't bore you by detailing the bureaucratic insanity of Verizon customer service any further because it has been thoroughly documented by countless other victims. Things were bad enough to begin with, but when they moved to Bangladesh it was utterly intolerable. Enter Fairpoint:
Recently we were notified that our Verizon e-mail accounts would be transferred to a Fairpoint server. Regardless of whether these companies are owned by the same people, we figured things could not get any worse with a new management team, so we decided to ride out the transition. In terms of e-mail, that occurred on January 31. Fairpoint said we would only have to change the domains in our e-mail client configuration. No problem, eh? But you know the price of allowing monopolies to control the market: nothing Verizon does is ever done right the first time, and Fairpoint is shaping up the same way. First of all, I can still check for mail at Verizon without an error but don't see any new messages. That's because they are forwarding mail to a duplicate account on Fairpoint's server. And this is what they said they would do. What they did NOT bother to tell us is that they changed the mail passwords too... and now they won't say what those passwords are! Fine, I thought--I will just go to the Fairpoint web site and reset them. Well guess what? That doesn't work either. So here is the situation so far:
-I cannot use the "manage account" feature of the Fairpoint web site because it won't let me log in.
-I cannot access mail through the web interface. It won't let me log in and there is no error message explaining why.
-I cannot contact Fairpoint technical support on the phone because the line has been busy for days.
-Nobody is answering a "live chat" request on the website after 10 hours of waiting in a queue. It does not say how many people are waiting ahead of me and there is no indication the chat service is even working (which I seriously doubt).
When I called Fairpoint Customer Service, the agent said that all of my complaints were valid: the fault was not on my end and people have been calling them for days about the same things. But they could not help and told me to call tech support (which they admit cannot be reached because the lines are perpetually busy). From other web sites I have now learned that 285,000 customers in three states have been affected. So there you have it: for the past 3 days several crucial business e-mail accounts have been disabled by Fairpoint and nobody will help us resolve the problem. They did not even acknowledge their mistake on the website and let us know not to waste our time on its broken account management features. They just decided to sweep this under the rug and graciously allowed me to spend 3 days trying to figure out what went wrong. How charming! But even though a legion of e-mail accounts are out of service and the local economy is losing thousands of dollars a minute, and the account management features of the web site are disabled, and they don't have enough people to answer the phones in tech support, Fairpoint still has resources to spare to update the horoscopes, weather and celebrity news on their home page! (MyFairpoint.net)
My god... these people should be hung by their toes and treated to a deep anal probe with an electric cattle prod. They had a YEAR since the merger to get their servers working properly! What in the world have they been doing for all of this time??? Did they think they were going to make these problems go away by pretending they don't exist? Do they really believe that by keeping us in the dark it will make things better? If Fairpoint's web site is going to be used for anything besides managing accounts, at the very least it should clearly explain service interruptions to customers which they have stranded. I pay them to carry my data traffic, not to create a cheap imitation of the Yahoo web portal. I don't care what my romantic "energy level" is supposed to be for today, I just want access to my subscriber account settings!!! Why was that issue not handled FIRST, before they started adding frivolous junk to their web site?
Is Fairpoint going to reimburse me for all of the time I spent on this issue? Are they going to compensate me for the business I lost because I could not respond to mail inquiries? Don't bet on it. Even a class action lawsuit will typically result in millions for the attorneys and a tiny, token settlement for the customers. I know it's like this all over, and that's what this post is really about: Are we going to put up with lousy, overpriced phone service forever, or are we going to do something about it? Some people claim that Fairpoint told them to take their problems to Verizon and Verizon just said to call Fairpoint. That is probably not company policy, but these shenanigans are just a few examples which illustrate how the regulatory system is broken: they demonstrate the need for a radically different approach which strongly favors competition. The existing duopolies are just too big to manage, even if they meant well (which is rather dubious, considering how they penalize us with higher prices for comparison shopping on individual services...and how they charge extra for things which cost them nothing to provide, like Caller-ID...and how they charge many people different prices for the same services in an attempt to squeeze the public for every last dime). We pay outrageous prices for lousy customer service because we keep re-electing career politicians who sell their vote to the highest bidder. But some of our legislators are merely uneducated. That is the real value of forums like this: the knowledge is available to anyone who wants to understand what is really going on. There is a better way to govern private companies that use public property, and even if this will not be addressed by the current regime, it's never too soon to start talking about it:
US NEEDS MORE BROADBAND COMPETITION
"Other countries with higher speeds and lower prices have generally taken a different route than the U.S. (...) many countries in Europe require incumbent broadband carriers to share their lines with multiple competitors... The European line-sharing approach is modeled after the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996, but that approach was later abandoned by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in favor of the network operator being the lone broadband provider. The Telecom Act has been "a huge success-in France," Windhausen said. (...) An ITIF report from May found that the U.S. paid more per megabit of service than 17 of the 30 member nations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The average download speed among consumer broadband services in the U.S. is 8.9M bps, according to the OECD, slower than average speeds in 18 other OECD countries."
»www.thestandard.com/news/2008/11···ert-says
WE NEED MORE COMPETITION, and that is what we need to keep hammering on if we really want to fix this broken system which eliminates the incentive for companies to provide quality service.
___________
PS. (Service outage day 4). The Fairpoint e-mail accounts have just started working. Now I can use the 'Manage Account' feature too (sort of). There were "security certificate" errors, the page does not display properly, everything loads EXTREMELY slow, some of the spam filter preferences were changed, and the 'Sign Out' option is not functioning at the moment. This just confirms that the problem was on their end. But some customers still don't have access. So it looks like some progress is being made but instead of the transition being complete on January 31 as originally promised, it's more like the transition began on that date. It also looks like we are getting billed about 25% more than the published rate. Meanwhile, mainstream news articles about the service outage have begun to appear online and in print, but it seems like Fairpoint is trying to downplay the scope of the problem and exaggerate the role of customer errors. They acknowledge some "bugs" and "glitches," but are determined to avoid specifics. I suppose all of this should come as no surprise: as the old saying goes, "the more things change, the more they remain the same." | |
|
Customer2020
|  Related news coverage
FAIRPOINT THREATENS TO DAMAGE CUSTOMER CREDIT RATING FOR ITS OWN ERROR
On April 29,2008 I wrote check number 1284 for $19.95 to Fairpoint Comm, Inc and mailed it. That check was cashed electronically on May 5,2008. On May 16, 2008 I received a very nasty letter from a collection agency representing Fairpoint and dunning me for $19.95.
»www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbc···ointblog
FAIRPOINT VIOLATES VERBAL GUARANTEES AND BILLS CUSTOMER FOR A FAULT IN ITS OWN EQUIPMENT
»www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbc···ointblog
FAIRPOINT BILLING CUSTOMERS FOR THE WRONG SERVICE PACKAGE
Today I got my FairPoint Bill and found long-distance charges, although I had the Freedom package... she said yes, they have seen these (incorrect) charges on bills. People - check your bills.
»www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbc···ointblog
FAIRPOINT VIOLATES ELECTRONIC FUNDS TRANSFER AGREEMENTS and VERBAL GUARANTEES
"Fair Point is now automatically withdrawing monthly bills early. Last month it was 7 days early, this month is 9 days early. Last month, customer support assured me that it was in the process of being corrected, but it has not. I was less than a dollar away from an overdraft charge..."
»www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps···90204001
___________
As Otter says, "I have watched this company for 10 years now - and have yet to see them come near telling the truth." But it's not just Fairpoint: many utilities are run by people who think they should always be in charge even when they are proven to be incompetent. The public service commission is worthless because the politicians do not really want to protect the public from those who abuse public property. That is why we have to change this regulatory model which is designed to prevent competition.
___________
FAIRPOINT TRI-STATE OUTAGE RELATED NEWS
# Verizon-FairPoint e-mail transition hits an early snag
# FairPoint grappling with e-mail
# FairPoint e-mail swap still wreaking havoc
# Three unrelated issues causing bouncebacks
# FairPoint seeing problems with transition of e-mail addresses
»www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbc···02039995
FAIRPOINT HUMILIATES CUSTOMERS
She was particularly annoyed because people trying to send her e-mail got responses saying "Connection refused due to abuse. Please contact your e-mail provider."
»www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbc···02049976
"Right now Verizon has all the email being sent to your Verizon account forwarding to your user account at Fairpoint but Fairpoint's server is considering it spam, and blocking it for abuse. On top of that they've managed to lose a lot of account information."
»Fairpoint switched over Verizon's alias names not username
FAIRPOINT REFUSED TO ANSWER THE PHONE
"I tried off and on for an hour-I got no place [in the queue]. First of all, it would ring busy. And then if you could get connected, it would ring and ring and ring, and then it would say, Your party is not answering."
»www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps···90204001
"After an hour of being on hold (got hung up on twice) I finally got a hold of someone from tech support."
»Fairpoint switched over Verizon's alias names not username
_______________
ENGAGE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD
"Customers were being helped one-by-one, he said, and call volumes had diminished by Monday afternoon."
»www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps···90202035
Possible Interpretation:
1) "Tech support answered fewer calls on Monday because they realized there was nothing they could do about a system-wide engineering problem."
2) "We reduced the volume of our telephone headsets on Monday because the customers were yelling so loud."
3) "We only have one person manning the phones in tech support."
"It seems to be a small percentage of customers..."
»www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbc···02039995
Possible Interpretation: "The problem involves a small percentage of the customers on this planet."
"The exact numbers of customers involved in each are uncertain."
»www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbc···02049975
WHAT FAIRPOINT DID NOT CONFESS TO CUSTOMERS AND THE NEWS MEDIA
According to information provided by FairPoint to the state Public Utilities Commission, the e-mail snafu has three unrelated causes.
1. Internet Protocol addresses for some of the Verizon servers were transferred incorrectly.
2. People who signed up for Internet service after Nov. 1, 2008, were not included in the "data extract" obtained by FairPoint.
3. "Many" people have had difficulty making the changes to update their e-mail systems
»www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbc···02049975
WHAT FAIRPOINT DID NOT TELL THE PUBLIC UTILITIES COMMISSION
»Fairpoint switched over Verizon's alias names not username
BEST OVERALL SUMMARY
"Fairpoint...seems to believe that cryptic communications to the media is the best way to communicate with customers concerning engineering problems."
»Telegraph coverage of email problems
THE BOTTOM LINE:
This service outage could probably have been avoided by migrating the Verizon accounts of volunteers first. It's called a "beta test." The following page indicates why a major aspect of the problem should have been easily detected during a beta test because it affects a majority of Verizon accounts:
»Fairpoint switched over Verizon's alias names not username
It's not surprising that Fairpoint has avoided discussing this aspect of the case because it demonstrates how good management decisions might have prevented the error from affecting the public. However, it does not explain this:
"...a friend of mine is an IT manager for an ISP where I live. We got our mail issues sorted but the ISP is still in trouble because Fairpoint swears that their ISP doesn't own the IP addresses that it DOES own..and because of that the PTR records are all screwed up and his reverse DNS isnt working..which is effectively killing his mail system for all of his customers."
»Fairpoint switched over Verizon's alias names not username
It would be very interesting to see a network engineer come forward and explain how that happened. It's starting to look like Fairpoint breaks just about everything it touches. Even if the board really cared about customer service, the size and complexity of this bureaucracy exceeds their capacity to manage it. This is why we must allow competition based on the line-sharing regulatory model. | |
|
WolfMooch
@myfairpoint.net
| What a screwed up company So long standing verizon business fios customer and overall my satisfaction with them was amazing.
Now fairpoint has cut all email access to our company and after literally 6 days I finally got someone on the phone. They couldnt find us in the system so decided to escalate it/
Chantale (my wonderfully abrasive support person) tells me they will email me the feedback once the ticket is close.
Huh.. EMAIL? When I asked how that was even possible I got a a stuffy answer of "The system will email you when it is corrected"
Weird.. How is that possible if my mail system is down.
Oh and I forgot.. She asked me for my password. Um, if I knew my password.. 1) No support person every asks for it 2) If you dont know it then what the hell is fairpoint around for?
Never before have I wanted to scream on a phone call since when an HP support person asked me to change my video resolution on a laptop that was broken in half.
GL Fairpoint.. Your going to need it. | |
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Fairpoint Takes Control Of Verizon Networks Saturday
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