Given the company all but imploded after taking on Verizon's DSL and landline networks in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, Fairpoint Communications obviously found it difficult to meet the broadband expansion conditions attached to the deal. Fairpoint will be meeting with Maine regulators next week in part to try and get an extension of the first phase of their agreed-to expansion plan from April to December 2010. As part of their deal with Maine regulators, Fairpoint agreed to:

•Reduce the rate for basic home and business telephone service by more than $4 a month, for at least five years.

•Make high-speed Internet service available to 83 percent of all lines within two years, and 90 percent over five years.

•Freeze prices for current Verizon 768kbps DSL customers at $15 a month with a two-year contract and $18 with a one-year contract, for at least two years.

Fairpoint not only wants to push back the deadline, they want to reduce the percentage of lines they agreed would be capable of delivering DSL. Of course we're talking about last-generation DSL. Fairpoint customers can all but forget about substantive next-generation broadband investment for the time being (with the exception of a few FiOS deployments Fairpoint's renamed "FAST").

Curiously, while the company struggled to expand broadband (much less get their financials in order), they've had time to lobby against public/private Maine efforts by the University of Maine and a company named Great Works Internet -- designed to bring additional broadband to underserved areas.