Fleeing Customers Haunt Phone Co. In New England

Last week, Norm Marsh of Augusta switched his bundled phone, Internet and TV service from FairPoint to Time Warner Cable Inc.

The 71-year-old disabled veteran said it was hard to get through to FairPoint's call centers — even when he called at 2 or 3 in the morning — to report e-mail and Internet problems. When he did get through, he was put on hold for long waits and customer service agents often couldn't help him, he said.

"Enough is enough," he said. "I am so annoyed at these people because they messed me up."

The losses eat into precious revenue; FairPoint's 2008 revenue was about $1.3 billion. In November, Standard & Poor's revised FairPoint's bond rating outlook to negative because of FairPoint's high level of customer defections.

Fairpoint CEO Gene Johnson said the decline in subscribers has been moderating. And its count of high-speed Internet customers rose in the final quarter for the first time since FairPoint's purchase of the Verizon assets was completed last March 31.

At the same time, Johnson conceded it's reasonable to assume more customers will leave after the glitches that occurred when FairPoint fully took over Verizon's computer systems at the end of January. During the "cutover" process, when FairPoint transferred millions of pieces of data from Verizon's computer networks to FairPoint's, thousands of customers lost services.