In the aftermath of last week’s storm, Vermont’s major electric utilities issued a steady stream of news releases detailing the number of customers without service.
But information on storm related telephone outages was hard to come by.
FairPoint Communications, the state’s principal telephone company, says it can't determine how many customers lost service due to the storm.
Both FairPoint and Green Mountain Power, the largest utility, rely on a mix of technology and customer calls to determine how many people are without service.
Technology alerts both companies to significant network problems when switches or circuits fail. These might affect 1,000 customers or more.
More commonly in a storm a tree falls on a line. In that case, both companies rely on reports from customers.
But Green Mountain Power also takes advantage of smart meters. GMP can send a signal to meters at homes in an area around a reported outage to determine who is without power.
Once a major repair is made, the company can also use the meters to make sure there are no other problems, which saves time for repair crews.
“In the old days, we used to tell people, ‘Leave the porch light on,’ and then the crews could drive up and down and see if everyone is restored. What we’re able to do now is to ping the meters," says Green Mountain Power’s Dorothy Schnure.
Smart meters help Green Mountain Power compile an accurate count of how many addresses are without power. For FairPoint there is no equivalent to a smart meter, or even a porch light.
Smart meters help GMP compile an accurate count of how many addresses are without power.
For FairPoint there is no equivalent to a smart meter, or even a porch light.
“We really do rely on our customers to report they have phone service unless we’re seeing some issue within our network,” says FairPoint Vermont President Beth Fastiggi.
She says that’s why it’s difficult to come up with a total number of addresses without service during a storm.
There’s also a difference in the way power and telephone systems are designed that can add to the difficulty of pinpointing phone outages. To get electricity, everyone taps into the same power line that runs up their road. If power is lost at one point along the line, it’s interrupted to everyone who lives beyond that point.
Fastiggi says unlike the power, the telephone service that comes into each home is a discreet pair of wires that runs all the way back to a central location, which can be several miles away.
Obviously, if a line is broken, everyone on it loses service, but she says that’s not always the case.
"We really do rely on our customers to report they have phone service unless we're seeing some issue within our network." - FairPoint Vermont President Beth Fastiggi
“Your individual wires could be broken anywhere along that path. That might not mean everybody along that path has their communications service out. It just could impact that one customer,” Fastiggi explains.
She says the company can test individual lines, but that’s used as a diagnostic tool, not to determine which lines are working.
Fastiggi says while FairPoint saw a spike in outages during the storm, the company is unable to determine the specific number of addresses that lost service.
She says doing so is also complicated by the fact that during power outages people delay calling about lost phone service.
“It definitely would take a lot of research on each individual trouble (report) a few weeks out to determine if each trouble that we got over that period was storm related or not,” says Fastiggi.
Fastiggi says FairPoint has a tally of the number of poles and cables it replaced due to storm damage. Counting customers is another matter, and so, according to the state, is getting their lines repaired in a timely way.
There has been an increasing number of complaints about delays in residential phone repairs since workers went on strike in October.
The Department of Public Service says it knows of 40 FairPoint residential customers who have been without phone service for more than three weeks.
Last week, the Public Service Board opened an inquiry into FairPoint service delays.
Fastiggi declined to say if the resources brought to bear during the storm are equal to those FairPoint had before union workers went on strike.
FairPoint customers say it is also often difficult to get accurate information from the company when service is lost.
In August the company gave out conflicting information about a major outage in Sharon.
In some cases, including the Sharon outage, state officials say they weren’t notified of problems.
FairPoint is required to alert the state when outages affect more than 25 people.
