STRATFORD--It's been two weeks since Frontier Communications took over cable, Internet and phone services from AT&T, and it appears there are still some problems.
The owner of a Stratford computer services company says he went 12 days without Internet and phone service and
Alan Gulish runs "Simplified Computer Services" out of his basement in Stratford. He's owned the web design company for about 10 years. But two weeks ago, Frontier Communications took over after AT&T sold them its rights in Connecticut. That's when the trouble started.
"On Oct. 27 is when we lost our service. Lost all three: Internet, phone and TV," said Gulish, speaking to Fox CT on Friday. The outage prompted Alan to post his cell phone number at the top of his website, so clients could get in touch.
"We thought this was a short term process. You give them a little bit of slack, they're switching over," said Gulish. But twelve days passed before his services were fully restored.
"This should definitely have been a smoother transition. We had less outage during the last hurricane that came through than we had during this," said Gulish.
After consumers complained about the transition, Frontier Communications announced a $50 bill credit to FrontierTV customers last week.
But as a small business owner, Alan said he's been hit harder, claiming the outages have cost him thousands in potential earnings.
"If you were out of work for a week and a half to two weeks I don't think fifty dollars would cut it for you either," said Gulish.
When asked about Alan's situation, Frontier emailed the following statement to Fox CT:
"We have approximately 2,500 Connecticut-based employees providing service to our customers on a daily basis.
Customer issues involving VOD are being handled, and as a matter of fact, we have nearly 50 percent of the most popular titles back in the VOD library and have added over 490 new titles not previously provided. We are targeting mid-month for the remainder.
Most customers were never affected by the conversion from AT&T to Frontier Communications. The total number impacted has never exceeded 10,000 out of the 1.3 million connections in the state. We are continuing to work any and all issues for our customers, and as a reminder, many of these issues happen on a daily basis, since weather, cars running into phone equipment, etc., affect our sophisticated systems."
Alan remains unsatisfied. He's hoping for a larger refund to recoup some of his lost business. "This is AT&T's problem, this is Frontier's problem--whatever regulators they had to get approval from Connecticut, they didn't look at this close enough," said Gulish.
On Friday, a Frontier spokesperson said he would have Alan's concerns escalated up the chain of command. Alan said he did receive a call from Frontier and hopes a resolution can be reached.