FairPoint Communications has been in the news a lot lately. VPR’s Steve Zind has been following the developments and explains the major issues to Vermont Edition.
Union strike
Unionized workers and Fairpoint have been in contract talks since the spring, but haven’t made much progress. The contract expired in August, and union members went on strike in October. Since then, there has only been one short meeting between FairPoint and the union, and no new meetings scheduled. If no settlement is reached, FairPoint could simply stick to its original position regarding workers’ contracts. If that happens, it could mean that union members would be put out of work if they don’t agree to the company’s conditions.
Repair delays
The Public Service Department reported that the strike caused already high levels of complaints and service-related problems to increase. FairPoint is supposed to make telephone repairs within 24 hours to residential lines, but has failed to meet this standard for quite some time. The surge in the number of FairPoint’s telephone repair delays to residential lines may be correlated with the strike.
911 Outage
Recently Vermont’s E911 system, which FairPoint now operates, experienced an outage which resulted in calls going unanswered by emergency services. This outage, which was caused by a failure in both the primary and backup circuit for E911, is likely unrelated to the strike. At this point, there’s no indication that service problems led to this outage, but the Public Service Department has asked the Vermont Public Service Board to investigate this, as well as the delays.
Why is the state getting involved?
FairPoint is basically the incumbent landline operator for Northern New England. Although about 30 percent of their customers have been leaving landline services in favor of cell phone service, a significant number of people only have phone access through FairPoint, which is why the state is concerned with making sure the company continues to provide services.
