Last Friday, April’s Fool’s Day, was the day Verizon handed off its gargantuan FiOS business in California, Texas and Florida to Frontier Communications. The deal, worth $10.6 billion, included sliding 5,000 California Verizon workers to the Frontier payroll. (In fact, instead of letting go Verizon employees, Frontier was planning on adding another 200 people to its California team.) And everything seemed to go along just swimmingly until that bump in the Sunshine State. Customers through the Tampa Bay region on Florida’s west coast reported experiencing lengthy Internet outages and other problems Friday that continued into Saturday, the Tampa Bay Tribune reported over the weekend.
The newspaper said Frontier officials “insisted Friday that problems were not widespread and were perhaps not as serious as depicted by the media. By Saturday, their tone had shifted as the company’s regional president, Mike Flynn, acknowledged, ‘I know we stubbed our toe a little bit here.’”
Flynn told the paper most major problems appeared to have been resolved, though individual trouble spots may continue. He said many complaints Saturday may be just normal, everyday issues that are not necessarily tied to the transition.
In its weekend report, the newspaper offered examples of the outages impact by quoting a Sarasota Solar distributor who said his company lost as much as $15,000 in business on Friday because phone and Internet lines were down, and a South Tampa optometrist who could not attain patient records and had to use his Smartphone as a hotspot to connect his office computers to the Internet.
Frontier reportedly had far fewer outage problems in California and Texas.
The Tribune quoted telecommunications analyst Jeff Kagan as saying, “This is a public relations nightmare. This is a black eye that Frontier didn’t want. I don’t know if the company could have avoided it or not. All I can say is that companies want to avoid stepping in the doo-doo. And Frontier has certainly stepped in it.”
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