Minnesota Commerce Finds Frontier Breaking Many Rules in 'Extraordinary Situation'

Minnesota legislature has provided a clear set of remedies to curb misconduct of rogue companies, ones who routinely, knowingly disregard the law ... including hefty civil penalties and criminal prosecution.” The investigation unearthed “an extraordinary situation, where customers have suffered with outages of months, or more,” the department said. Many consumers reported the company losing their trouble reports. Record keeping “appears to have become so deficient that, for some critically important data, such as data on duration of outages, the Company’s records cannot be relied upon by Frontier’s executives or the Commission to know if the company is meeting its performance obligations or not,” it said. “It will take significant, multistep actions by the Commission to set Frontier on a path to reach an acceptable level of performance, and any actions ordered by the Commission will need verifiable methods to ensure compliance.” The telco disagrees, though it “recognizes we experience service issues and delays from time-to-time with some of our customers,” a spokesperson said. “We are an ethical company committed to our customers and the Minnesota communities we serve. We take this matter seriously and will respond appropriately." Parties have 30 days to comment, then staff will analyze the record and bring the matter to the commission for consideration, a PUC spokesperson said. Opened last February, the probe (see 1811190030) received more than 1,000 consumer complaints and statements, including about 650 reports about the company's phone service and 325 about internet access, the Commerce Department said. “As with almost all complaints to regulatory agencies, the number of customers who took the time to attend a public hearing, write a public comment, or to report their concerns to a government agency by filing a complaint is likely to be a fraction of the customers with similar experiences.”