Quite some time ago I had conversation with a member of the Maine PUC about phone and internet service in Maine. This was after the Fairpoint takeover of Verizon had been proposed but not yet approved. I expressed my opinion that I had very mixed emotions about Fairpoint. On the one hand, I has DSL courtesy of Fairpoint , but on the other hand the service and reliability was lousy. Last night they struck again.

I had intentions of making a post last night about wood heat in Maine. When I got home from work about midnight my DSL was down and my wife told me that it had been down since about 9:00 PM. I called Fairpoint and got through to a tech person who told me that she would put in a repair ticket.

I have to digress briefly and explain that DSL is not a toy in our house. My wife runs a busy and successful photography studio called Fenn Fotographics where she does portraits, weddings and commercial photography. I spend my days helping her and my weekends photographing weddings with her. This is our busy season and DSL is our lifeline. We order photos from the lab over the DSL. We communicate with customers through email. We maintain our own web site with frequent updates using the DSL. When the DSL goes down, we are unable to conduct business in a normal manner.

About 9:00 this morning, still with no DSL, I again called Fairpoint about our lack of DSL. The service people were always polite but couldn't or wouldn't give me any indication of when the DSL might be working again. I once experienced about a week of being unable to upload files to the lab due to a Fairpoint DSL issue and had to get the labs tech guy in Missouri to conference call with Fairpoint to diagnose the Fairpoint problem, so I am not too confident in the ability of Fairpoint to solve a problem or in their concern that the problem get solved in the first place. I started to get slightly rude and informed the Fairpoint tech guy that without DSL I was unable to service my customers and earn money to support my family and pay the mortgage. I needed to know when the DSL would be working again. All he would do is keep telling me that a repair ticket had been put in and they "tried" to get to them the same day. Frustrated, I thanked him and hung up. Within 10 minutes the DSL was back on.

I am glad that I wasn't without DSL for a week this time. One of our big customers this time of year needs over 300 individual portraits delivered the next day after taking the photos. We couldn't do this without DSL service. I am grateful to Fairpoint that DSL is available at all because we live pretty much in the boonies and I'm quite sure that Verizon would not have offered us any DSL at all. My father lived in a suburb of Brunswick with a fairly large population and Verizon didn't offer them DSL. Before DSL was run to our house I used satellite internet which worked quite well but was expensive. DSL is slightly faster and cheaper.

I believe that Fairpoint will bring DSL to a large part of Maine that currently doesn't have it. They know that this is the future of their business. I am concerned that the service is not as reliable as it could be. I can't wait multiple days for service to be restored. I would like to see Fairpoint get their act together on customer service. In the meantime I just have to think that bad service is better than no service at all.

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