Conn. Consumer Advocate: Tougher Standards, Penalties for Frontier

Frontier Communications performs well on “important” service-quality metrics, the carrier said Friday in responding to an investigation by Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA). The Frontier probe began earlier this year in response to a Jan. 8 petition by Connecticut's Office of Consumer Counsel (OCC), which flagged Frontier for failing to meet minimum standards for out-of-service repair and maintenance (see 2401310006 and 2401080041). In OCC’s Friday brief, the consumer advocate urged PURA to impose additional and broader service-quality standards and open another proceeding for considering monetary penalties.

Frontier failed to meet minimum service-quality standards for completing maintenance appointments and for repairing out-of-service (OOS) telephone lines within 24 hours, according to the company’s semi-annual reports between January 2015 and July 2023, OCC said. The maintenance standard requires companies to appear for at least 90% of appointments, Frontier was noncompliant 30 out of 96 months -- or 31% of the time -- on average statewide, the consumer counsel said: For OOS repair, it was noncompliant 44 of 96 months, or 46% of the time. In the state capital region alone, Frontier didn't meet the repair standard 39% of the time and missed the OOS repair standard 50% of the time, OCC said. Additional data that OCC reviewed after its initial petition, including PURA complaint data and Frontier responses to data requests, "confirm that remedial action must be taken at a statewide, regional, and wire center level, and the company must be held accountable to disincentivize future noncompliance that would put residents at risk," the counsel said.

Frontier agreed it hasn't consistently met maintenance and OOS metrics but said "its performance is trending up” in those areas and service overall is "good." Since acquiring Southern New England Telephone Company (SNET) from AT&T in 2014, "Frontier consistently meets its service quality obligations on all but two of the regulatory metrics implemented in 2000 when [plain old telephone service (POTS)] was the primary voice communications option,” the company said. But the number of landlines has dropped by 74% in the past 10 years and Frontier shows "consistently excellent" performance on "the most important metric," trouble reports per 100 access lines, it said. "This metric shows whether the network is in overall good working condition -- the less trouble reports, the more evidence that the network is strong. Frontier has met that metric every month and every year since it acquired SNET."

Frontier downplayed the importance of the two metrics the consumer advocate flagged. "There is no evidence that customers place any particular value on service restoration within the arbitrary 24-hour time period set by the metric,” the company said. “The sole articulated rationale for the metric was a belief customers needed POTS to summon help in emergency situations. That rationale has all but vanished ... [C]ustomers now have multiple means of contacting authorities and communicating more generally," such as cellphones.

OCC strongly disagreed. “The two standards Frontier is indisputably noncompliant with are among the most damaging to consumers if they are not met. Should Frontier miss a maintenance appointment or fail to restore a phone line experiencing an outage quickly, Connecticut residents may find themselves unable to complete a call in urgent or emergency situations." Many might not have another way to access emergency services, OCC added.

PURA should "impose additional performance and remedial standards for the next three years, to ensure that Frontier is maintaining its network and facilities,” urged OCC: And the regulator should issue a violation notice and open "a contested proceeding to evaluate appropriate penalties." OCC's petition asked PURA to impose civil penalties of up to $10,000 per day of noncompliance.

Also, PURA should “broaden its interpretation of the Quality of Service statute to include non-copper modes of landline service delivery, such as fiber,” argued OCC: The service-quality standards "relate to provider conduct with and responsiveness to consumers,” it said. The rules don't "specify that their applicability is limited to certain transmission technologies nor do they govern rates for services."

But Frontier said Connecticut regulators needn’t act. The company already is spending “millions of dollars” to expand fiber, it said. Meanwhile, “robust competition in the Connecticut voice service market militates against service quality regulation or the imposition of penalties for missed performance of service quality standards the Authority recognized were in need of review and revision more than 15 years ago." Besides, said the company, “Frontier has either paid, forgone exogenous costs, or credited customers related to its performance on the service quality metrics since 2015.”

PURA plans to distribute a draft decision by June 18, under the current schedule for 24-01-15. If the state regulator meets that deadline, written exceptions would be due June 26 and commissioners could vote July 10.