FairPoint Communications is in a tough spot. The company’s landline customer base is steadily declining, yet it is mandated to provide this service throughout the state.
The company is also mandated to reach service benchmarks set by the Public Utilities Commission. Over the last few months, while FairPoint workers have been on strike, the company has failed to meet four of the five benchmarks, leaving customers without vital service.
Regulators are now struggling with how to get the company to improve its service and to fix problems more quickly when things go wrong. The typical response would be for the PUC to levy fines against FairPoint. But this is unlikely to make a difference. The company is so far out of compliance with state requirements, it is not clear that those requirements matter to FairPoint.
The first step, Public Advocate Tim Schneider says, is for state officials to decide what problem they are trying to solve because the solutions will likely be different depending on the answer. Is it to ensure that you can dial 911 from anywhere in Maine? Should everyone have a broadband connection? Is it to help FairPoint through these difficult times so it can improve its service in Maine?
The state’s interest should be to ensure Maine residents have a reliable communications network. In much of the state this exists, with several carrier options, including cellular phone and Internet providers. For many rural places, however, landline service remains a vital link, and FairPoint is the only carrier.
As with many other services in Maine, telephone connections in rural Maine are expensive and there are declining numbers of people to pay for them.
But this is the company’s mandate. It is what is called a “provider of last resort.” As a result, it has service requirements, set by the PUC, to meet.
FairPoint hasn’t met some of the requirements for years, making them essentially meaningless. In November, the company failed to fix landline problems within 24 hours 90 percent of the time. The state’s requirement is that no more than 12.5 percent of problems wait more than 24 hours to be addressed. The company hasn’t met that benchmark since April 2012.
The company continues to challenge new requirements put in place last summer and ask for more money to meet its mandates.
With FairPoint consistently — and by huge margins in the last year — failing to meet this basic service requirement and saying it likely never will, Maine doesn’t really have a provider of last resort.
If FairPoint isn’t providing the service, it is time for the state to look at other options. The public advocate’s office recently conducted a small sampling of the 200 telephone exchanges where FairPoint is the only provider to see if calls went through, sometimes on cell phone networks. In some exchanges there was no problem, but in others there were. The survey is expected to be made public next week.
This is important work to determine where true problems exist so they can be resolved with better-focused solutions.
Mainers should have reliable telephone service, but the cost can’t be limitless and efforts to ensure such service shouldn’t take away from other needed communication infrastructure, such as high-speed Internet.
