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Verizon Sells Off Rural Lines
ffejie writes "Verizon has announced that it will be spinning off rural assets to FairPoint Communications. These include all assets in the states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The deal will close sometime in 2007 and is worth $2.7 billion. 1.6 million phone lines, 234,000 DSL subscribers, and 600,000 long-distance customers will be moved to FairPoint in Verizon's effort to shed its low-margin lines in rural areas. The sale has been rumored since the summer at least. With Verizon aggressively rolling out high-speed FiOS (FTTP) in its service area, what will happen to the consumers stuck with a smaller telco like those moving to FairPoint?"
For those who know nothing about FairPoint Communications. Their strategy is to buy up markets that no one else wants to serve and operate them for as cheaply as possible. Quality of Service will not go up...it will go down in a huge way. I work in one of their tech support call centers. We used to be their exclusive tech support for all of their subscribers, however their service was so bad it was costing us money since we have a standard monthly billing, we ended up telling to them to take a hike. One market had about 60% of their subscribers calling in every month. Every time it rained everyone lost sync on their modem. That properties' tech support has been outsourced overseas. The worst Fairpoint property my company still handles has 976 subs. We plan for 390 of those calling in each month. Our overall average for Fairpoint companies is about 25% of their customers calling in for internet support each month.