Tag Archives: formal complaint

Epic Broadband Outages

Every once in a while I hear a customer story that reinforces the big mistake we made in largely eliminating broadband regulation. This particular story comes from the Chatham News + Record in Chatham County, North Carolina. Some customers there experienced what can only be described as epic outages.

The first outage occurred on October 1 to residents near Charlie Cooper Road from a downed line as the result of hurricane Ian. Duke Power restored power within two days, but it took twenty days for Brightspeed to repair the damage. This is the new incumbent telephone company that purchased the property from CenturyLink. Not to give Brightspeed an excuse, but the outage occurred while the network was still owned by CenturyLink – the sale of the network closed on October 3, two days after the outage. Twenty days is still an extraordinarily a long time to make a line repair, but I’ve been part of the aftermath of the sales of telecom properties, and the first thirty days are often rough on the buyer.

The second outage occurred in the same rural neighborhood on November 28 when a tractor-trailer pulled down wires that were hanging too low. Residents believe that the low wires were a result of a shoddy repair from the hurricane Ian outage. By this time, Brightspeed had owned the company for two months, and it took a full month, until December 27, to restore service.

Customers were highly frustrated because they got no useful response from Brightspeed customer service. There seemed to be no acknowledgment that there was an outage, even as multiple people called multiple times to complain about the outage.

This is not an unusual story in rural America. I’ve talked to dozens of folks who are rural customers of big telcos who have lost broadband for more than a week at a time, and some of them regularly lose service multiple times per year.

The article describes the problems the outages caused for residents. One resident was quoted as saying that broadband access has become as important as having water to the home.

One would think that consumers with this kind of problem could seek relief from the State – that a regulator could intervene to get the telephone company’s attention. When I was first in the industry, a customer complaint that was referred from sent a state commission got an instant priority inside a telephone company.

But a workable complaint process is now a thing of the past. The rules for making a consumer complaint with the North Carolina Utility Commission are a barrier to the average consumer and seem to favor big telcos. It’s not even clear if the NCUC has jurisdiction over broadband – that’s not clear anywhere after the FCC under Ajit Pai walked away from all broadband regulation. The NCUC still lightly regulates telephone service, but it’s not clear if that applies in the same way to broadband.

Regardless of the regulatory issues, the process for filing a complaint is not simple. A consumer must complete an official complaint form and file an original and 15 paper copies – complaints cannot be filed online or by email. The NCUC sends a copy of the complaint to the utility, which must respond in ten days. If the suggested solution from the utility is not adequate, the consumer can either drop the complaint or ask for a formal hearing – which would be an intimidating process for most folks, because the hearing is held in a formal court setting following normal court rules. Not many consumers are going to wade through this highly formal process, which is slanted in favor of utilities and their attorneys and not consumers.

The reality is that consumers have been at the mercy of the big telcos ever since state commissions deregulated telephone service. I’ve heard hundreds of stories over the years of big telcos who have run rough-shod over folks. One of the most common stories I’ve heard in the last few years is of telcos disconnecting DSL rather than trying to fix it.

The first outage for these folks could have slipped through the cracks due to the extraordinary event of the telephone company changing ownership right after the outage. But there is no possible excuse for the second month-long outage. Most of my clients are small ISPs, and they all would have fixed this second outage within a day. I’ve repeatedly cautioned about giving large rural grants to the large telcos, and this outage is one of a thousand reasons not to do so.

FCC Ignoring Consumer Broadband Complaints

One of the best aspects of broadband regulation was that a consumer was always able to file a complaint against an ISP with the FCC, and the complaint process generally resolved disputes between customers and carriers. If customers had legitimate complaints about billing or service, a complaint sent to the FCC generally solved the issue; if the carrier was in the right, the FCC sided with the carrier and asked them to explain the applicable laws or rules to the customer involved. This complaint process was the ultimate backstop for people who had tried every other avenue for resolving a dispute.

But starting with the Restoring Internet Freedom order where the FCC voted to kill net neutrality and to kill Title II regulation of broadband this all changed. After that order, the FCC stopped intervening in broadband complaints from customers. They now forward complaints to carriers but don’t insist that problems are resolved.

Jon Brodkin wrote an article about this last November where he documented a case where Frontier was billing $10 per month to a customer who had purchased a FiOS router before Frontier purchased the property there. The company insisted that the customer pay the fee for a router that the customer clearly owns. Even after a complaint was filed at the FCC on the issue, Frontier wouldn’t change its position. The FCC did nothing about the complaint – the agency forwarded the complaint to Frontier and considered the issue settled.

In the past, the FCC would have looked at the facts, which in this case any person off the street would have resolved in favor of the customer. If the FCC got too many complaints on the same issue, they would pressure an ISP to change their practices.

It’s conceivable that the FCC no longer has the power to resolve complaints and just doesn’t want to publicly say so. When the agency voided their ability to regulate broadband, it’s likely they also voided their ability to intervene on any topic related to broadband – the agency effectively gelded themselves.

As Brodkin points out, the FCC isn’t being truthful about the complaint process. They told US Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) that they forward complaints to the Federal Trade Commission, but it turns out they only forward complaints that the FTC asks about – not most complaints.

The FCC has informed some consumers that they have an option to file a formal complaint. This is a process that costs $235 and that ensures that the agency will at least look at the issue. This is the process normally used to resolve pole attachment complaints and similar disputes between carriers. A formal complaint initiates a formal process that the average person probably would find difficult to comply with – a formal complaint initiates the equivalent of a legal proceeding, and there are specific procedural rules and a legal process of filing documents and pleadings on a pre-determined schedule. A formal complaint that doesn’t follow the processes and protocols would likely be tossed as being non-responsive.

Unfortunately, paying this fee for a formal complaint still might not do any good since the FCC no longer has jurisdiction over a broadband billing dispute or other broadband issues. The resolution of a formal complaint might result in nothing more than an FCC ruling that the customer should have gone to the FTC instead of the FCC.

There are other ramifications of the Restoring Internet Freedom order. When the FCC killed its ability to regulate broadband it also theoretically voided the State’s ability to regulate broadband as well. State regulatory commissions have always had a complaint process similar to the FCC’s, but since the law of the land is that broadband is no longer regulated, consumers can’t take these complaints to a state commission. The only current recourse for a consumer is to go to the FTC. Unfortunately, the FTC regulates bad behavior by all corporations, and so the agency only opens an investigation when there are numerous complaints against a specific ISP on a specific topic. The FTC does not intervene in or try to resolve individual consumer complaints.

I don’t think it has registered with the general public that broadband is unregulated. This means that consumers are on their own when ISPs harm them and no government agency can intervene on their behalf. There is no better example than the one that Brodkin had highlighted – Frontier feels safe in mistreating a customer even when under the eye of regulators, and even when they are blatantly wrong. To Frontier, keeping the erroneous $10 in monthly billing is obviously more important than doing the right thing by a customer – and there seems to be nothing a customer can do than perhaps finding somebody in the press to highlight their story.