Open letter to Mr. Paul Sunu, CEO of FairPoint

Mr. Sunu,

When I moved to Pittsfield, Vt., in November 2013, I became a new customer. Though I had heard many reports of how unreliable FairPoint service is locally, I had no issues for the first six months. Suddenly it became an enormous problem. There is rarely a day I am able to make it through without restarting my modem, usually more than once. Typically those are the days I am simply not home.

I run a small business out of my home and depend on the Internet for my business. We do not have cell service here, so I use a microtower. If the Internet is down, so is the cell phone. I cannot get enough bandwidth to utilize Skype or Google Hangouts. My clients report I sound “garbled” and if I can be heard, there is often a 10 second delay or greater. Today even using the chat there was upwards of a one-minute delay for my words to post into the chat box.

Mr. Sunu, I realize my business is far smaller than yours, but I beg you to consider, for just one moment, what your day would look like if you could not make any of the calls you were scheduled to make, be at any of the appointments you were scheduled for, or had to drive to another location simply to use the phone. I beg you to consider sitting in your car in a parking lot to make client calls. Can you imagine even one day like that? That is every business day for me lately.

I call technical support. While they are friendly, they are rarely helpful. If they open a ticket, I wait days and may or may not hear from the technician. I usually have to make multiple calls–typically from my car in a parking lot because I can’t get the Internet to work long enough for the microtower to allow a call.

I have called customer support and they did comp me a month, but curtly told me they “couldn’t do this every month.” Personally, I’d rather the service worked and we did not have to have the conversation again. Yet, here we are, another month and I am wondering why I am paying for a service that is so unreliable. Oh, yes, because you are the only Internet providers in Pittsfield. We are essentially held hostage by a monopoly.

Did you know there is a Facebook page called “Pittsfield needs reliable Internet”? That is simply a sad reflection on a company whose tagline is “A connected community is a social community.” I think we have become MORE social as a result of NOT being connected via FairPoint.

I understand your company is busy expanding and dealing with a strike. However, what’s the point of expanding if you can’t serve existing customers, sir? This has to be resolved. What can you do to expedite this issue?

Respectfully,

Wendy Reese, Pittsfield