With the problems that have plagued Verizon customers in New England, all eyes turn to the regulators who'll rule on Verizon's latest plan to offload of a huge swath of rural customers to Frontier Communications. The $8.5 billion deal immediately infuses Frontier, which has 2.3 million customers, with 4.8 million new residential and small-business phone lines and 1 million broadband connections. 11,000 Verizon employees will be transferred.

We've already explored how some customers in South Carolina are stuck in broadband no-man's land until the deal goes down (and perhaps even after). Now Ohio has temporarily suspended their approval of the Verizon/Frontier deal after the Ohio state's utilities consumer advocate started wondering if Frontier can handle the acquisition:Of course the questions raised by the state consumer protection expert are the same questions that were raised before regulators gleefully approved Verizon's offloading of New England to Fairpoint. Going from 480 customers to half a million is certainly no joke, and it's the kind of growth that's currently eating Fairpoint alive. For their part, Verizon insists the Ohio delay is routine. Frontier insists they can handle the load, though that's of course precisely what Fairpoint said before their new customers entered customer support purgatory.

Again, the winner has consistently been Verizon in these deals. Verizon lawyers use a sophisticated financial maneuver known as a Reverse Morris Trust to dump a significant amount of debt on smaller telcos, while grabbing millions in tax writeoffs, and purging themselves of pesky rural customers they had absolutely no interest in upgrading. The often already struggling telcos who acquire the booted customers then spend millions on integration and debt management, and have little to nothing left for next-generation upgrades.