The Associated Press reports that the head of the New Hampshire Office of Consumer Affairs "was "astounded" at the size of FairPoint Communication's work order backlog.
At the beginning of April, FairPoint had a work order backlog of 13,000 across Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. The Nashua Telegraph reported, "By FairPoint's own admission, some 1,300 of those people have been waiting more than 30 days." Some of the customers waiting for service in New Hampshire for telephone service or repair included "elderly people with medical needs."
The President of FairPoint, Peter Nixon, predicted that the service order backlog and the telephone customer service issues would be resolved by the end of June.
Meredith Hatfield, the Consumer Advocate of New Hampshire countered:
"What is the plan to remedy this immediately?" "There are significant defects even for common retail and wholesale transactions. What about the people who need plain old telephone service? When will these be fixed? June 30 is far too late."
A lawyer for the New Hampshire commission criticized FairPoint's plan to rectify the problems: "There is little or nothing in the plan addressing how the systems, processes and people will actually achieve their goals."
To repeat: "There is little or nothing...addressing how... the systems, processes and people will actually achieve their goals."
During the Ice Storm of 1998, CMP and Bangor Hydro brought in 1000s of power workers from across the country to bring the State back on line; even then it took nearly two weeks to finish the job. This winter, after a severe ice storm in Southern New Hampshire, crews were again came in from as far away as the midwest.
The electrical workers came because of a mutual aid agreement; in the case of a natural disaster, crews from one part of the country are dispatched to the affected area.
However, FairPoint's problems are not the result of a natural disaster; rather they are the result of a corporate disaster.
It is a disaster made by a company with just 300,000 customers in 17 states on March 31 2008 which was simply unqualified to take on an additional 1.6 million customers in Northern New England.
"I argue today, as I did a year ago, that it is my humble opinion, that neither "the PUC nor FairPoint has the management, the technical abilities or the horsepower to oversee or to make this transition from Verizon to FairPoint successful. Northern New England is already behind MA, CT and RI technologically, and we don't need FairPoint's failures to cause us to fall even further behind.""
Although the PUCs of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont hired Liberty Consulting Group of Pennsylvannia to monitor FairPoint's progress over the last year, somehow both the well paid Liberty Consulting and the Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont PUCs either did not know of FairPoint's backlog until February or failed to act on warnings they had received.
It is now time to formally admit that FairPoint has failed the states of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont in every aspect.
FairPoint had a year to plan for the actual transfer of the lines from Verizon, but it was not ready on January 1 2009.
It was not ready for the transfer of the email account transfers from Verizon.
It was not ready for the transfer of billing from Verizon.
In my earlier blog, I called the FairPoint failure a case of a "goldfish attempting to swallow a whale."
Just two weeks later, I realize I was being too generous.
This goldfish did not make a single serious attempt to swallow the whale; it had a year to prepare and didn't even nibble.
FairPoint's failure to serve the citizens of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont has gone beyond the point where we can give FairPoint until June 30 to admit yet another failure.
The citizens of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont deserve a working, reliable telecommunication voice and internet system; we need to have phones and internet installed and fixed in a timely basis, and we need to know that our telecommunication company can survive financially.
The Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont PUCs and Liberty Consulting of Pennsylvania bear a great deal of the blame for not seeing this massive failure coming, even from day one when tiny Fairpoint with just 300,000 customers proposed to buy Verizon's 1.6 million Northern New England voice and internet customers.
Reliable telecommunication is now a necessity.
The Governors of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont must remove this very serious failure from the purview of the state PUCs.
The PUCs are simply not up to a train wreck of this magnitude.
The Governors must guarantee the citizens of their states that we will have a working telecommication company by June 1, or the Governors must find a telecommunications company or a management company can do what FairPoint cannot.
Update 4/5
After posting this blog, I ran across this April 1 2009 postmortem report from the Liberty Consulting Group on the NH PUC site. It appears to have been prepared in response to the Maine PUC request for a response plan from FairPoint.
While the report is not detailed enough to answer my critical questions -- such as how did the work order backlog get to 24,000 without anyone anticipating the backlog -- the report concludes with several recommendations including:
"There is currently a lack of unified senior executive leadership at FairPoint to guide the planning and execution of structured, programmatic actions to expedite its return to a normal business operating environment. ….There are a number of ways to rectify this problem, ranging from using outside resources with expertise in similar situations to help FairPoint with the analysis and problem resolution up to and including permanent executive level change."
The report also indicates how inadequate Liberty's oversight of FairPoint was: "Liberty has not yet completed a root cause analysis of why the widespread problems are occurring despite FairPoint's extensive preparations and training."
Liberty was paid WELL to anticipate and warn the PUCs of the likelihood of these problems arising, not to wonder months later WHY they occurred.
This report alone supports my thesis that Liberty and the PUCs are way over their heads.
It is not time now for Liberty and the PUCs to be diagnosing how and why FairPoint failed.
It is my humble opinion that Liberty and the PUCs cannot muddle along analyzing the past any more; the state Governments, and not the backward looking PUCs and Liberty must chart a path to our telecommunications future.
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I can not agree more that Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont deserve a competent, working communications system and that at this time Fairpoint is not providing what they promised.
Additionally, this mess casts a very negative reflection on all the state governments involved, since their PUC's bear the responsibility to make sure that the citizens get what they are paying for.
We have repeatedly heard about Gov. Baldacci's plans to improve Maine's communications network. If our current problems with Fairpoint are any indication, the Governor's promises and plans hold as much water as any of the other leaky buckets that he and the Augusta crowd have foisted off on Maine's citizens over the course of his administration.
I would certainly like to see a solution to the Fairpoint predicament, but where do we turn at this point to resolve the issue? Are our options to petition Verizon to provide alternatives or to simply seek another provider? If so, would this be accomplished?
Posted by Peter Cutler April 8, 2009 08:41 AM
Back when the Maine PUC was holding public hearings regarding the Verizon sale, various parties urgently warned them that Fairpoint was unprepared to assume the debt load and service requirements of such a large business. As usual, the PUC ignored the opposition and ginned up some research to support the predetermined sale. I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that these kinds of deals are worked out beforehand behind closed doors, and the public hearings are nothing but sham events to assuage the rabble and justify staff positions over at the PUC offices. Two years later, all the warnings have proven prophetic. Fairpoint’s shortcomings are well documented, and the company’s ability to survive long term in the shrinking economy is suspect given the massive amount of debt on their books.
Fairpoint is like a little league team that found itself miraculously elevated to a major league baseball franchise: At first, they were ecstatic about their seeming good fortune – but now they’re beginning to realize that they’re in way over their heads.
Thanks Maine PUC for your usual great work. Nice job of looking out for the welfare of common Mainers, and not the corporate interests that they are beholden to.
I appeared at two of those PUC meetings, one in Maine and one in New Hampshire (Portsmouth). As I have written in moth my FairPoint blogs, I just could not understand how a company with 300,000 customers in 17 states which implied decentralized management could have HOPED to take on 1.6 million customers.
The ME, VT and NH PUCs, along with FairPoint should be sued in a class action suit by some of the 24,000 people who were on backorder in February or the 13,000 on Backorder on April 1.
I simply CANNOT tell you the number of emails I received from people from across Northern New England affected by FairPoints backlog.
Business owners losing 10s of thousands in sales, children of the elderly still waiting for phones, people who have moved since January 1 and STILL have NO phone.
It is simply criminal.
For the PUCs and Liberty NOT to have anticipated this is shameful.
For the Governors to continue NOT to do anything about this is bordering on the criminal.
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