Frontier Consumer Complaints Up in Several States

Consumer complaints about Frontier Communications' service quality have risen, according to state commission data obtained by Communications Daily. Regulators in 16 states provided data about 2015-19 complaints voluntarily or through Freedom of Information Act requests. Officials in some states with increasing complaints weren't surprised to see similar problems elsewhere. The telco said it works with state commissions to meet service quality metrics.

The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this year, and state reviews of its reorganization are pending, including in California, Connecticut and West Virginia. New York approved the plan, with a condition that the telco spend $9 million on service quality (see 2010160044), and some other states are seeking similar (see 2011230055). Several states probed the carrier's service in recent years, including Ohio, Minnesota and West Virginia.

Complaints dropped or fluctuated in some places. Connecticut showed a downward trend. Complaints fell in California and Texas after spiking in 2016 as the carrier struggled to integrate Verizon networks (see 1605090043). Concerns dropped in Oregon and Washington state in years leading up to Frontier closing its sale of those networks to Ziply Fiber in 2020 (see 2005190009).

The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission got more complaints in 2018 (285) and 2019 (261) than the three previous years combined. Most of the concerns in the latest two years were about service. Installation or repair delays were 66 of 136 service complaints in 2018, and 82 of 190 such issues the next year. Billing was the second most common type of 2015-19 complaint.

Minnesota PUC Commissioner John Tuma isn’t “surprised at all that this is happening in other jurisdictions,” he emailed: Frontier business decisions to focus efforts have led to the company de-emphasizing some less profitable areas. The PUC cleared the reorg in September and pledged to keep watch (see 2009240045). The commission settled with the carrier last year after a service-quality probe (see 1910170052).

Tuma’s “second impression oddly was a sense of relief that we were not the only ones experiencing problems,” he said. “The challenge for us now will be how to take that common frustration and work together. It is clear ... that not all the problems are the same and how you develop a collaborative effort to move a company like this in a decentralized and deregulated industry where the technology will continue to outpace the regulator's ability to help customers is daunting.”

Ohio PUC consumer contacts doubled to 2,346 in 2019 compared with 2015. Combining contacts about regulated basic local exchange service and non-BLES services included 781 for outages and 390 repair requests in 2019. Billing disputes were the subject of 105.

Ohio’s commission cleared a settlement in August under which Frontier agreed to provide out-of-service bill credits to non-BLES customers, even though commission rules don't require that, a PUC spokesperson noted.

Complaints to the Michigan PSC went up 58% to 355 in 2019. The company averaged about 238 complaints in each of the previous four years. Leading categories included repair and service issues.

Elsewhere

West Virginia formal complaints increased 46% from 2017 to 57 in 2018, then rose 72% to 98 last year. Most were about service quality. Informal complaints jumped 30% from 2016 to 1,048 in 2017, then spiked 53% to 1,603 in 2018. The number stayed about flat the next year. The top informal complaint type each year 2015-19 was customer-reported outage. The second most common was phone reception or transmission problems.

Frontier seems worse than non-telecom utilities previously monitored by West Virginia PSC Consumer Advocate Division lawyer Tom White. “They are in trouble because of declining customers,” he said in an interview. “They can't come up with the money to do what they should do.” Frontier’s reorg remains pending at the West Virginia PSC, which recently audited the carrier’s service quality (see 2005210022). A finding in the March audit that more than 950,000 connections in their copper system are vulnerable to corrosion especially dismayed White, he said. “That's an impressive number.”

The service provider had poor monthly service quality reports last year -- until the PSC selected an auditor in July 2019, White said. “All of a sudden, some of their metrics started to really improve. But they still continued to get lots of complaints.” White said he has seen consumer complaints closed and later reopened, presumably because they weren't actually resolved. West Virginia deregulated broadband in 2015, but White sees frequent complaints about internet service from Frontier consumers who assume the PSC has jurisdiction, he said.

Consumer complaints jumped in New York, where the carrier has a smaller presence. The Department of Public Service received 245 in 2015, 379 in 2016 and 261 in 2017. That rose 76% to 459 in 2018 and increased an additional 29% to 592 last year. Service-related complaints were more than 60% of complaints in 2018 and about 70% in 2019. The department had 1.71 customer trouble reports per 100 access lines monthly in 2018, up from 1.45 the year before. It declined slightly to 1.65 in 2019. Frontier outages generally declined, from 10 in 2015 to three in 2019. The company’s 2019 average response time to consumer complaints was nearly 10 days.

The New York PSC has “actively addressed numerous customer inquiries, as well as those from local, county, and State government representatives and first-responder organizations, regarding Frontier’s network reliability and lengthy repair durations,” a spokesperson emailed. “In response to these evident and unacceptable network reliability concerns, we have directed Frontier to develop and implement a plan to remediate poor localized network reliability conditions and improve overall service quality performance.”

Formal and informal complaints at the Pennsylvania PUC grew. There were 14 formal complaints in 2019, up from three in each of the previous three years and one in 2015. The PUC doesn’t release 2019 informal complaint numbers until December but counted 129 in 2018, up each of the past three years. More than half of the complaints in the three most recent reported years were about unsatisfactory service. The PUC reported 1.1 justified consumer complaints per 1,000 residential consumers, while 88 of the 129 complaints involved broadband.

The Arizona Corporation Commission received 41 informal complaints last year, including 18 regarding billing and 17 service quality. That was up from 2018, when the agency received 25 complaints and similar to 2017. Frontier had two Arizona outages in 2019 after zero in 2017 and 2018. A Sept. 2 outage from a failed server lasted nearly four hours and affected 30,380 E-911 users. Customers could dial 911, but public safety answering points couldn’t automatically retrieve their location and phone number.

Past Problems

Informal complaints about Frontier spiked at the California PUC during 2016’s troubled transition from Verizon. That April to December saw 624 complaints. Over the nine months before Frontier took over, the CPUC got 365 complaints about Verizon.

Total complaint numbers about Frontier California then fell to 566 in 2019. Frontier represented about 35% of all communications industry informal complaints in 2016, falling to 15.6% in 2020, a CPUC spokesperson said. The Communications Division noted the downward trend in complaint volume in an Oct. 28 report, saying many people faced outages during the takeover.

Complaints about Frontier to the Texas PUC similarly appeared highest immediately after the company acquired Verizon assets. The agency got 79 complaints in 2016 and 105 the next year. That dropped to 60 in 2018 and 43 in 2019. The PUC sent us three major outage reports by Frontier from July 2017 related to an AT&T fiber cut.

Complaints decreased over the past five years in northwestern Frontier territories acquired this year by Ziply.

Oregon consumer complaints increased from 351 to 485 yearly from 2015 to 2017, and then dropped back down in the next two years to 2015 levels. This included regulated landline and unregulated broadband.

Washington state's Frontier outages generally decreased. There were 15 in 2015, affecting a maximum of about 49,000 lines, declining to two in 2019 (about 1,000 lines). Consumer complaints were little changed at about 97 a year.

Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority had a downward trend, from 506 in 2016 to 274 in 2019. Phone service quality complaints fell from 158 to 36. Billing complaints slid from 187 to 107. PURA received 42 complaints about phone outages in each of 2015 and 2018 and 37 in 2019, but there were fewer such complaints in 2016 (25) and 2017 (19). The bump in total complaints in 2018 was driven by more billing and general complaints that year, plus a severe storm that caused outages, a PURA spokesperson said.

Illinois customer complaints also trended downward. The Illinois Commerce Commission reported 334 complaints in 2019, up 34% from 2018. Two-thirds of the latest concerns involved service. Numbers had been on a downward trend in previous years, dropping from a high of 403 in 2016 to 304 in 2017. Through Oct. 31 this year, the commission got 217.

“That you can have roughly similar problems in multiple states requiring multiple states to enforce suggests the FCC is falling down on its job,” said New York Public Utility Law Project Executive Director Richard Berkley. The numbers are especially concerning during a pandemic that's making communications critical, the consumer advocate said. Rising complaints where Frontier has larger presence shows New York “made a good choice” when it blocked the telco from buying Verizon’s upstate network in the 2000s, he said. Frontier essentially acknowledged it made poor decisions when filing for bankruptcy, and Berkley suspects there’s more to it than financial trouble, he said: “Landline carriers are trying to exit the market.”

The FCC got 12,000 complaints about Frontier in 2016, spiking from 2,000 the year before, an FCC spokesperson emailed Monday when we asked for comment on state data. Federal complaints dropped to about 6,000 in 2017 and around 5,500 for the next two years. Other state agencies didn’t comment further on complaint data.

'Fresh Start'

“Frontier takes service quality seriously,” a spokesperson emailed Tuesday. “Frontier expects state public service commissions will continue to examine voice service quality and other issues consistent with their jurisdiction and oversight of intrastate telecommunications services.”

The telco is working with several state commissions on “specific steps to achieve service quality metrics and has already reached agreement with commissions in Minnesota, New York and Ohio,” the spokesperson said. “Frontier’s efforts have resulted in overall improved performance from 2019 to 2020. Frontier has also worked hard to address service quality concerns in West Virginia and has consistently met applicable service quality metrics -- not required of Frontier’s competitors -- month over month since August 2019. Frontier has also achieved a significant reduction in the number of complaints to the WV PSC in 2020 over 2019.”

“The data reflects the varied ways different states measure service quality reporting,” cautioned the company's representative. “The data also reflects the day-to-day realities of operating a highly complex network characterized by a high degree of individualized service conditions where customer service issues often require personalized attention. Frontier effectively responds daily to hundreds of requests." He added that "uncontrollable events including severe weather, construction crews damaging cables, vehicles hitting telephone poles or destroying roadside equipment cabinets" can disrupt service and delay response.

Restructuring under Chapter 11 will eliminate $10 billion of debt and nearly $1 billion in annual interest obligations, a “fresh start” that will mean new investment in the carrier’s network and operations, the rep said. A bankruptcy court OK’d the plan Aug. 27 and the carrier got state OKs from Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Virginia.

Editor's note: This is part of an occasional and ongoing series of articles about telecom consumer complaints. For more, see here for when Frontier filed for bankruptcy. Subscribers can also see here about other concerns about the telco.