There has been no shortage of well-deserved criticism heaped on FairPoint Communications, the North Carolina telecommunications company that bit off more than it could chew when it bought Verizon's northern New England land-line phone business last year.

FairPoint's customer service failures have been well documented, and they are more than just predictable growing pains for a company moving up in class. Service delays have left some residential customers dangerously out of touch and have threatened the lifeblood of some business customers by leaving them without a presence on the Internet for extended periods.

But not enough criticism has been steered toward another player in this drama, the Maine Public Utilities Commission, which has been slow to act in response to FairPoint's failings.

It has recently moved against the company's interests by refusing to waive $845,000 in penalties for service delays that harmed small telecommunications providers. But the commission also deserves some skeptical attention for failing to act more decisively sooner, when it became clear that there were problems.

They had warning. Liberty Consulting, the company that the PUC hired to monitor FairPoint, wrote a report saying that regulators in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont "have closely monitored FairPoint's attempts to rectify the system's failure but have imposed few, if any, performance or managerial requirements on FairPoint. During this monitoring period, FairPoint has made little progress in resolving its issues. Given these failures, continuation of this approach is not recommended."

In other words, imposing performance requirements would be the way to go, according to the PUC's consultant. Why hasn't the PUC done that? Members of the Legislature's utilities committee are asking the same question.

The PUC can open investigations and mete out penalties if they are warranted. They can also use their broad powers as regulators to get to the bottom of what's happened to FairPoint and what needs to be done.

To that end, they should involve the smaller, competing telecommunications companies that rely on a healthy FairPoint system to meet their demands and who understand what's at stake.

"There are companies out there that are afraid they are going to go down with FairPoint if things don't get fixed," Wayne Jortner, a lawyer with the Public Advocate's Office told lawmakers this week.

FairPoint has agreed to a recommendation of the Public Advocate's Office to hire a consultant who would oversee its improvement effort for its operating system and report directly to the PUC. That would be an improvement, because, as Jortner said at the hearing, "The time for FairPoint to fix FairPoint's problems is over."

The time for the PUC to wait for that to happen has also passed. The commission should use all of the tools at its disposal to improve the performance of this vital utility before its customers suffer any more losses.

(c) 2009 Portland Press Herald. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.

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