Fleeing Customers Haunt Phone Co. In New England

By CLARKE CANFIELD

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Phone companies fear that customers will increasingly switch off their landlines in favor of wireless phones or phone service from cable TV providers. So the last thing FairPoint Communications Inc. needed was to send subscribers fleeing with a botched technical transfer.

Now the company is trying to delay a debt payment and has seen its stock crater.

It all began when FairPoint swallowed an enormous acquisition.

North Carolina-based FairPoint owns and operates 32 phone companies in 18 states, with a total of 1.9 million access lines. Most of those came when FairPoint paid $2.3 billion a year ago for Verizon Communications Inc.'s 1.5 million phone and Internet lines in northern New England.

Many subscribers were already getting itchy last year. FairPoint lost 12 percent of its residential and business lines — more than 152,000 of them — in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont in 2008, a much higher rate than the nationwide peer average of 7 percent.

Now more subscribers are heading for the doors after experiencing e-mail, Internet and customer service problems in recent weeks after FairPoint took total control of the Verizon system.