FairPoint Promising Fix; Consultant Skeptical

Customers should start seeing improvements soon, company spokeswoman Jill Wurm said.

"We're going to do some interim steps, which will correct things quickly," she said of service in New Hampshire. "And then there will be some longer-term final solutions in place."

But significantly improving service by the end of June probably is unrealistic because of the scope of the problems, the Liberty Consulting Group said in a report dated Wednesday.

"Senior leadership has continued to make statements that understate the problem severity and overstate success in fixing them," Liberty said.

It said the Jan. 30 "cutover" from Verizon went fairly smoothly, but has been followed by a "post-cutover crisis" as FairPoint failed to respond quickly and effectively to problems as they arose.

Liberty said some Internet service problems have been resolved.

From the start, some questioned whether FairPoint was a big enough company to manage the northern New England network it bought for $2.3 billion.

FairPoint remains confident it can fix the problems, Wurm said.