The state is calling for an investigation into an increasing number of customer service complaints about FairPoint Communications.
Officials also want a review of an emergency 911 outage Friday they say endangered public safety.
For the past year, the Vermont Department of Public Service says it’s been working with FairPoint to resolve issues involving long repair delays for the company’s home telephone customers.
But state telecommunications director Jim Porter says the situation went from bad to worse when FairPoint’s unionized employees, including repair people, went on strike in mid-October.
“After the work stoppage the numbers have really spiked precipitously and they’ve really reached a point where they’re not acceptable from our perspective," says Porter.
Porter says between Sept. 4 and Nov. 30, the department received 388 complaints from FairPoint customers. That’s an approximately five-fold increase from the same period last year.
Porter has petitioned the quasi-judicial Public Service Board to investigate both the repair delays and the outage Friday that affected the state’s E-911 system.
FairPoint says the nearly six hour outage was due to equipment failure and a fiber optic line that was damaged by a fallen tree.
The state says the company’s response to the failure was inadequate; Porter says the petition seeks a board order that would force FairPoint to take specific actions.
“What I suspect we will do is hire an expert to go in and look at the FairPoint systems and see how they work and hopefully come up with a solution for how they can be fixed,” he says.
Porter says FairPoint would have to pay for the expert. It’s also possible the company could be fined for both poor customer service and the public safety issues that arose from the 911 outage.
The Public Service Board litigation is a formal process that will take time, although Porter says he hopes it will be expedited.
