Anyone out there a valued Fairpoint DSL custumer, like us? Our eternally-poor service got even poorer on Friday night when we lost internet — turns out a system failure that is apparently affecting other users around the state. It was still off this a.m. Wondering if anyone else has any news about it? Unlike Green Mtn Power, which is quite good at sharing outage info, Fairpoint has no place on its website for this, & their tech people are very careful not to reveal anything.
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so far so good
We’ve been ok here at world headquarters in Brattleboro. Maybe a couple of slight slowdowns, but nothing major.
Constant issues with both phone and DSL
Dialup internet in southeastern Guilford drops out or won’t connect frequently, so we didn’t ever bother with DSL (which would be on the same lousy lines anyway). Luckily a new AT&T cell tower along I-91 enabled creation of a cellular wifi hotspot.
Dummerston along Route 30 isn’t any better, often staticky phone and sometimes can’t even get a dial tone. So never bothered with DSL there either, expecially after hearing neighbors complain of slowdowns and dropped connections.
In both locations, service seems to be getting even worse. Can’t say we had any new specific problems this weekend, however.
Out briefly
Fairpoint was out briefly here in Bratt tonite (Tues) about 9:30.
This is a widespread outage
I will shortly be able to check in on our landline & find out if service is restored. Thanks to the several people who posted with things like “brief outage” & “sometimes have spotty coverage,” both of which are constant for those of us on Fairpoint DSL in more rural areas.
What I was actually reporting was a 4-DAY outage, continuously out, not sporadic, which Fairpoint tells us is a wide scale outage of Fairpoint internet. Being Fairpoint, which I would currently rank way beyond minor players like Wal-Mart as a bad company, they don’t want to share much info with us, the mere paying customers. The most I could get out of them was that “your city is affected.” Rather meaningless, aside from the fact that we don’t live in one of Vermont’s handful of “cities” anyway. Besides which, our next door neighbor DIDN’T get the outage, whereas our neighbor up the road did.
So it’s on certain circuits from Burlington (Fairpoint’s internet apparently comes from there) not others.
By point of comparison, our electric company, Green Mountain Power, on its website shows where outages are, with a map & list of how many customers in each outage area, et. AND if you call them up & ask about an outage they’ll say things like: “we had a substation in snoodleville that was hit by lightning and they’re replacing the transformer now” or the like. Same idea: a network providing service to customers via wires, but a big difference in letting customers know what’s happening. Oh, & GMP will say “service should be restored by 5 pm.” Fairpoint says nothing of the sort.
Many people throughout Maine, NH & Vt objected when Verizon said they were gong to sell their landline phone service to Fairpoint, a non-New England company. The Public Service people in each state eventually foolishly approved the acquisition. Almost immediately Fairpoint went bankrupt — duh, we knew they were financially shaky. They seem to have held on, but their internet service has been terrible all along.
All we can hope is they go completely belly-up and someone better will buy up their territory.
Keep in mind that in rural areas, cable isn’t available (of course that’s monopolized by Comcast, another highly regarded company!) So we are trapped & have to deal with Fairpoint.
Anyway, my original post was to see if anyone not in our neighborhood was having the same multi-day outage, but apparently not.
Rap-Up
Just to do a final (w)rap on my Fairpoint issue: last night when I found our DSL was still out I called tech support & they revealed that the big outrage was resolved — just not our outage. Several modem restarts didn’t fix it, but later in the evening I discovered after 6 days we had DSL again. BUT this a.m. out again.
You know that dorky poll that’s in the newspaper a few times a year where one is supposed to vote for favorite hairdresser, burger place, waiter etc? I think it’s well past time for a poll of the WORST businesses. I have such a fave to add to that.
This probably concludes this thread, but I’m sure I’ll have more exciting updates in future. (Oh, I’m using a wi-fi location at the moment to post this, in case you wondered how I got online!)