PORTLAND, Maine — State utilities regulators moved Tuesday to broaden an investigation into FairPoint’s landline service quality, opening the company to the possibility of more fines for network troubles on its regulated telephone lines.
The Maine Public Utilities Commission on Tuesday agreed to investigate FairPoint’s service quality reports for the last three months of 2014, a period during which the company’s call center employees and technicians were on strike in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.
In a February filing, FairPoint asked regulators not to investigate its far below-average service quality report for the fourth quarter, attributing network troubles and failure to record any major outages to the strike and severe weather, which it said were unforeseeable.
In order to avoid an investigation and possible penalties for service quality shortcomings, the company would have to prove the problems were a result of an unavoidable accident, or “force majeure” in legal terms.
The three PUC members rejected FairPoint’s arguments in their order Tuesday.
“We are not persuaded by FairPoint’s arguments that its labor troubles and Maine’s winter weather are unforeseeable events for which the company was unable to prepare,” the opinion states. “We are also skeptical of the claim that it is possible, given events the company considers to be ‘extreme’ and ‘force majeure,’ that there were no major service outages.”
The company, which has about 28,000 provider-of-last-resort phone customers, reported 119 major outages through September and would need to have about doubled that in the last three months of the year to surpass a benchmark of 234 major outages, which would be grounds for the PUC to consider penalties against that metric.
The company reported that nearly 90 percent of landline problems took more than 24 hours to resolve in November and December, which is about triple the average for November and December 2013.
The strike was resolved in a tentative agreement Feb. 19 with the help of federal mediators, who required both parties not speak to the media about negotiations during that time. While still in mediation on Feb. 2, the company did identify the strike specifically as contributing to the service quality problems, saying the backlog “has been caused by many factors, including weather.”
The commission decided to conduct its investigation of FairPoint’s fourth quarter numbers alongside a review of third quarter service quality reports.
The review will put the company’s service quality statistics up against new rules that took effect in the summer of 2014, requiring the company to resolve about 87 percent of all network troubles within 24 hours, averaged over the previous 12 months.
The company has opposed those new requirements, arguing they are unreasonable and unfair as they compete against companies not required to provide state-regulated “provider of last resort” landline phone service in areas that are not necessarily profitable.
That investigation will determine whether FairPoint should pay penalties for failing to meet state service quality standards and, if so, how much.