Frontier sees broadband, video service issues in newly acquired Verizon territories

Frontier completed its acquisition of Verizon's (NYSE: VZ) wireline properties in California, Florida and Texas on Friday, but it appears that the initial switchover has been bumpy with a number of users telling local media outlets they were seeing issues with their broadband and video services.

According to a report in the Tampa Tribune, Frontier acknowledged that it had some problems as the telco began the formal integration of the Verizon assets in the three markets.

"During the early morning of April 1, 2016, a technical issue occurred during the integration of the systems Frontier acquired from Verizon that impacted service to some enterprise and carrier customers in Florida, Texas and California," Frontier said in a statement on its Twitter page.

The telco added that "an unrelated fiber cut occurred that impacted customers in the Tampa market."

Frontier had not responded to FierceTelecom's request for an update on the outages by press time.

Separately, AT&T (NYSE: T) reported that its wireless customers in Tampa Bay also experienced outages on Friday morning because of a "local service provider issue," the company stated. However, the service provider did not tell the Tribune what caused the issue nor if the Frontier problems had anything to do with the AT&T outage.

Frontier was among a number of service providers that were affected by the fiber cut.

On its @AskFrontier Twitter page, tweets about the telco's cutover appeared to be a mixed bag with some users seeing a smooth transition to their new providers, and others seeing degraded broadband speeds.

Other customers noted that the telco's video on demand library was offline, and some customer portal settings and functionality were not working.

Kevin Gonzalez, the general manager of an aluminum distribution company in Tampa, said his company was losing $10,000 an hour because its VoIP service uses a broadband connection from Frontier and customers could not call to place orders.

"If customers can't get through to us, they'll call our competitors," Gonzalez said.

While Frontier has plenty of experience in integrating large properties into its fold, the issues it is encountering in these newly acquired markets is similar to what it saw after acquiring AT&T's Connecticut assets in 2014.

After Frontier ported the AT&T customers onto its own system, customer complaints spiked over lost connections. The service provider offered $50 credit for all of its 170,000 broadband TV customers affected by network issues at that time.

For more:
- Tampa Bay Business Journal has this article
- The Tampa Tribune has this article
- DSL Reports has this article

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