100 FairPoint customers put out by DSL outages

MILFORD – About 100 FairPoint customers went without DSL Internet service Wednesday. Company officials said a bad circuit at a Manchester facility caused the outage.

The outages were limited to southern New Hampshire, according to company spokesperson Jill Wurm, and were remedied by around 12:30 p.m.

John Richardi, 39, of Milford, is one of the people who went without their FairPoint Internet service for most of Wednesday.

For him, it’s the latest in a string of service interruptions and problems since the North Carolina-based company took over Verizon’s $2.4 billion in landlines in New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont last month.

Wurm didn’t know how many people the DSL service interruption affected. About 85 customers placed calls to the company. “The DSL problems appear not to be widespread,” she said. “That’s the report that I’m getting at this point.”

Richardi was one of a handful of FairPoint customers who called The Telegraph to report that their Internet wasn’t working. He said he tried to check his e-mail from his home computer during his lunch hour and realized his service was down.

He spent 20 minutes talking to an automated answering service that told him to check the company’s Web site for more information before talking to a person in the billing department.

“They had no idea when it would be back online,” Richardi said. “You get through and there’s no answer. No one has any answers for anything.”

FairPoint has been besieged with problems since the official “cutover” from Verizon systems last month.

Most notably, about 20,000 customers lost e-mail service during the cutover. FairPoint has announced plans to credit those customers.

Richardi was one of those customers. He lost service for 10 days, he said, and has had other billing issues with the company.

“I think the service has been lower than expected. For me personally, the transition has not been smooth,” he said.

Richardi said while he hasn’t been happy with FairPoint so far, he doesn’t blame them entirely.

“I think it’s every single Internet service provider out there. It’s the same with phone companies, the same with television companies,” he said. “I blame FairPoint, but at the same time, I know it’s universal. Any utility, they all do the same thing.”