Fairpoint continues to struggle with taking ownership of Verizon's Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont DSL and landline networks. In a nice deal for Fairpoint, the same regulators who couldn't see problems during the deal approval process -- have allowed the company to implement a top secret improvement plan customers don't get to see -- discussed this week in a closed-door hearing that consumers don't get to attend. According to the Nashua Telegraph, the public portion of the hearing didn't provide anything of use, so nobody really knows what's being accomplished -- if anything:Consumers will have to wait for answers to why the carrier continues to struggle with poor (sometimes nonexistent) customer service, billing problems, and a huge order backlog. About 11,000 Vermont Fairpoint customers this week enjoyed an outage that left them without service for most of Monday. 6,000 customers who canceled service because of the problems were mistakenly billed for non-existent service -- and are still waiting for refunds from Fairpoint. A little transparency doesn't seem like much to ask.

The transaction was a great win for Verizon, who shed a mountain of debt, offloaded rural markets they didn't want to upgrade, and netted an estimated $600 million tax write off. Consumers and Fairpoint aren't faring quite as well, and the problems raise the question whether regulators should continue to sign off of every merger and acquisition they see. It also raises the question whether Frontier -- who is about to obtain an even larger swath of rural Verizon markets -- is ready for the challenge.