Frontier Outage Prompted Long Beach City Council's Action

LONG BEACH, CA — After receiving a flood of complaints from residents, the Long Beach City Council directed staff to compile a report of the issues the city faced since the switch over from Verizon to Frontier at the meeting Wednesday night.

The agenda item was proposed by council members Al Austin, Suzie Price and Daryl Supernaw and was passed unanimously.

Austin, recognizing that the city does not have the regulatory authority over the Frontier Communications, said that this is a quality of life issue.

"When quality of life is impacted, we hear from the constituents," he said. Austin said residents have complained of not having access to call 911 in case of an emergency.

Since Frontier took over Verizon services on April 1, there have been complaints of service outages — including several council members who joked that they are missing "Game of Thrones." The company said less than 1 percent customers are affected by the transition.

"We did expect there would be some gaps (in services)," Frontier's West Regional President Melinda White said. She said the problem was largely a software issue and the company is addressing them as quickly as they can.

Councilwoman Suzie Price pointed out that the complaints to her office "seems to be unending."

White said residents can send their concerns or report outages via email to LetMelindaKnow@FTR.com.

Councilman Robert Uranga said he want the city to send a letter to the California Public Utility Commission to do a full investigation into the problem. He said this outage is akin to the power outage last summer in Long Beach and the city asked CPUC to investigate Southern California Edison.

“I’m not sure why there’s such an issue with the transition from Verizon to Frontier,” Uranga said. “It might be that Verizon’s systems were faulty or weak or needed work that was delayed or not done. Or it could be that Frontier was totally unprepared to take over a system that was weak or didn’t take the protocols necessary to see what was going on with Verizon before completing this deal.”

Long Beach's director of technology and innovation Bryan Sastokas said the city has reached out to Frontier and the CPUC on April 13 because of the volume of complaints from residents.

“The CPUC is fully aware of the difficulties that residences are experiencing, the CPUC commission has also ensured the city that a new Frontier consumer point of contact has been established for residents so they can call directly for issues concerning services and or outages,” Sastokas said.

Long Beach State Assemblyman Patrick O'Donnell has organized a townhall meeting Saturday, May 14 at the Expo Art Center so that residents can have the chance to voice their complaints directly to the Frontier's representatives and the CPUC.

— Photo courtesy of Frontier Communications.