Ajit Pai refuses to investigate Frontier's horrible telecom service

[Eugene]

Source: Ars Technica

Ajit Pai refuses to investigate Frontier’s horrible telecom service

Long outages and bad customer service mar Frontier's government-funded network.

JON BRODKIN - 5/8/2019, 12:35 PM

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has rejected a request to have the FCC investigate Frontier Communications' business practices in Minnesota, despite evidence that the company has failed to properly maintain its telecom network.

An investigation by the Minnesota Commerce Department already found that Frontier's network has "frequent and lengthy" phone and Internet outages, that Frontier has failed to provide refunds or bill credits to customers even when outages lasted for months, that Frontier is guilty of frequent billing errors that caused customers to pay for services they didn't order, and that it has failed to promptly provide telephone service to all customers who request it. When we wrote about the investigation in January, Frontier said it "strongly disagrees" with the findings but did not dispute any of the specific allegations.

The Minnesota Attorney General's office is investigating whether Frontier violated state consumer-protection laws, and the state's two US senators asked Pai to have the FCC investigate as well. When Pai wrote back to the senators, he said that he has asked his staff to "monitor" the state investigation but made no commitment to have the FCC investigate, too. Pai's response and the senators' letter were posted on the FCC's website this week.

"For a chairman who is so concerned with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse, it's baffling that the commission tasked with overseeing billions of dollars in public money is declining to investigate the more than a thousand allegations of poor service by a company that receives that public money to provide those services," US Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) told Ars in a statement today. (The Minnesota investigation was based partly on more than 1,000 consumer complaints and statements.)

Frontier is receiving $283.4 million each year from the FCC's Connect America Fund (CAF) between 2015 and 2020 to provide rural Internet service in parts of 28 states, including $27.6 million a year in Minnesota.

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Read more: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/ajit-pai-refuses-to-investigate-frontiers-horrible-telecom-service/

[TexasProgresive]

1. I am so glad I retired from Verizon fGTE before they sold to Frontier.

I see pedestal open to the sun and rain with the 24-26 guage wires. This can't last long as the insulation will break down in the sun causing outages. Our local line concentrator has not have the backup batteries changed since I retired. They are dead as a hammer. As soon as we loose power the land line is dead. It is supposed to stay up for a minimum of 8 hours. Good batteries will often last 3 days.

Former co-workers have told me they are not budgeted any time for maintenance and rehap of plant. All of the experienced workers for the central offices where I worked have left and the COs are in the hands of former outside techs with no real experience in switching, special circuits and fiber optics.

It makes me sad.