Business as usual.
Hundreds of fiber-to-the-home customers crashed and burned when Frontier Communications took over ownership of Verizon’s wireline networks in California last April. Phone, Internet and television service was disrupted, apparently because the customer data Frontier received from Verizon was faulty. The problems were compounded by a temporary call center that was drafted in to help Frontier get through the transition period.
The company’s position is they’re in business as usual mode now, and preliminary data from the California Public Utilities Commission appear to back it up.
The CPUC met in Long Beach last week, ground zero of Frontier’s meltdown. Of the 30 or so members of the public who signed up to speak at the meeting, only one man used his time to lambaste Frontier. That’s one indicator that things are getting better – more people made the trip to Sacramento last May to complain to legislators, when the troubles were at a peak.
The available stats also show marked improvement. More than 500 people filed complaints about Frontier with the commission in April, and more than 600 in May. By June, that number was down to a quarter of that level and it continued to drop in July and August. In September, only 62 complaints were received, which does look like business as usual – Frontier expects to handle 50,000 service issues in a normal month, according to regional president Melinda White, speaking to lawmakers in May.
The flood of problems was concentrated on the FTTH systems that Frontier acquired from Verizon, and “there was no similar widespread service disruptions for the rest of the service territory using traditional voice service over copper lines during this transition period”, communications division director Michael Amato told commissioners. The communities hardest hit were Camarillo and Santa Monica, and a cluster of cities around Long Beach, including Lakewood and Huntington Beach.