PORTLAND, Maine — FairPoint Communications has asked regulators for permission to stop signing up new customers for regulated landline service in Scarborough, Gorham, Waterville, Kennebunk and Cape Elizabeth.
The request follows a law passed last year allowing regulators to gradually shrink the list of places where it requires FairPoint to provide basic landline service, or POLR service, to any customer who requests it.
Bangor, Portland, Auburn, Biddeford, Lewiston, Sanford and South Portland were the first areas where regulators freed FairPoint from the service requirement.
The company argued that those areas had enough unregulated competitors to ensure customers have access to telecommunications services and that maintaining its mandatory lines there were an unnecessary burden.
The company said it would begin notifying customers in the next batch of five towns as part of its February bills. The company had about 21,000 POLR customers in 2015, according to the latest annual report from the Maine Public Utilities Commission.
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The North Carolina company is pursuing a $1.5 billion sale to the Illinois-based Consolidated Communications, pending regulatory approval. FairPoint secured the offer after emerging from the country’s longest labor dispute of 2015 and winning its legislative battle to wean itself of mandatory landline requirements.
The law doesn’t mean FairPoint will drop landline service in those areas or cut off current landline customers. In any areas removed, the company has to provide an additional year of price-controlled service to existing POLR customers. After that, it has to seek further state approvals to reduce or discontinue service to landline customers in areas where it previously was the provider of last resort.
In those areas where FairPoint will still be required to provide landline service, the law caps its rates at $20 per month and increases would be capped at 5 percent annually.
As with the other communities removed, regulators have set a schedule for public hearings regarding the removal of POLR service.
All of the following meetings are set for 6 p.m.:
—Cape Elizabeth, March 20, Town Hall Council Chambers, 320 Ocean House Road
—Gorham, March 22, Municipal Center Council Chambers, 75 South St.
—Waterville, March 23, City Council Chambers, 93 Maine St., 3rd floor
—Kennebunk, March 28, Town Hall Room 300, 1 Summer St.
—Scarborough, March 30, Municipal Building Council Chamber A, 259 U.S. Route 1