Consumer advocates, unions and state regulators are worried that Verizon's plan to sell a massive chunk of their DSL and landline networks to Frontier Communications won't go very well. The $8.5 billion deal, if approved, would infuse Frontier with 4.8 million new residential and small-business phone lines across 14 states, 1 million broadband connections, and 11,000 former Verizon employees. Frontier, who currently has just 2.3 million customers, would become a giant player literally overnight, and fears that they'll struggle with the load seem legitimate.

The fear is the deal will end just as Verizon's Fairpoint and Hawaii Telcom deals did: bankrupt carriers, outdated networks, and shoddy service. Unions are worried about layoffs and pay reductions, and have been running a series of ads illuminating how Verizon's particular method of offloading unwanted customers doesn't usually work out well for the customers.

At the same time, Frontier has been traveling state to assure regulators that they're far more financially stable than Hawaii Telcom and Fairpoint. West Virginia state PSC consumer Advocate Division for one isn't buying it, this week advising against the deal. Why? The PSC argues that Frontier's financial projections are based on "overly optimistic assumptions," they won't have the funds to handle network problems, and that they haven't laid out concrete plans to deal with increased complaint volume.

Frontier meanwhile has launched a new public relations offensive. The company has started running a series of TV ads supporting the deal in key states, and has also launched a new website in West Virginia, informing them the deal will "get them into the digital fast lane, faster." The site urges customers to write their lawmakers, and offers a note to customers from Frontier CEO Magie Wilderotter in which she promises to do a better job than Verizon did:Given Verizon spent the better part of the last decade neglecting West Virginia infrastructure almost entirely in order to focus on more affluent markets, doing a better job shouldn't be that hard. The problem is (just as it was with Fairpoint and Hawaii Telcom), that once Frontier takes on the debt required under the deal, integrates all new systems, and tackles the certain influx of confused customers -- they may be in no financial position to upgrade much of anything.

But Frontier's new website doesn't just promise to extend DSL, it promises to offer "next-generation broadband Internet services." One problem with that claim is that even before the Verizon deal, Frontier has had a hard time delivering anything more than current generation 3 Mbps DSL to many users. You'll also recall that Frontier has tinkered with the ideas of imposing 5GB a month caps on all user tiers. Frontier's been about as far from "next generation" as a carrier can get -- be it in urban, suburban or rural markets.

The company's now promising to effectively triple its size, keep all of those customers happy, extend DSL deeper into rural markets, and deliver next-generation broadband upgrades. It's certainly ambitious, and some might argue impossible.