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I recently have had the experience of dealing with the worst customer service that I have ever had to deal with. My girlfriend and I recently moved apartments and decided to keep our current DSL service when we did so. This was despite that fact that a month and a half before we moved we had asked Fairpoint for an upgrade to our DSL service, to move us to the top tier for speed, and still didn’t have the upgraded service when we moved.

So when we moved to our new apartment we figured that we would have the service upgraded to the new tier when we moved. The first problem was when my girlfriend called and after being on hold for at least 20 minutes was told that it was the wrong department and they would give her the number for the new department, where she had to sit on hold again for at least 30 minutes. After being put on hold for so long she finally got a person and was in the middle of changing our account over to the new address when all of a sudden the line just went dead. She was extremely upset at having been disconnected after such long hold times that I had to talk her into calling back. Well after being on hold again she learned that the department hours had finished at that time and as far as we can tell the operator just hung up on her instead of spending 5 minutes to finish the transaction.

I called the next day, experienced the incredibly long hold time of around 20-25 minutes and spoke with a nice gentlemen on the other end of the line. I explained what had happened the day before and after some confusion on his end, since we just had DSL and no phone service we don’t have a phone number with Faripoint, we managed to get the account number entered, the address change completed and I was told that the DSL would be activated on April 1st, about 2 weeks from the date of the call. I figured this wasn’t too bad, even though it seemed to me to be too long.

Being in the middle of a move we didn’t see much problem waiting for the DSL to be hooked up and on the 1st I hooked up the DSL modem and it didn’t have any service. I thought, “Gee that’s odd”, and tried it on a couple of other outlets, still nothing. I repeated this process for a week and still no hookup. Since we were both fairly busy and neither of us felt like wasting an hour to deal with Fairpoint we ended up waiting and trying to get the other one to make the call. Finally my girlfriend had a half day at work and decided to make the call, this was on April 22nd. She was told that the service still hadn’t been hooked up and was still in their queue. She told them to cancel the service and when asked why she was canceling she explained that since it took them over a month to hook up the service and it still wasn’t hooked up they just lost a customer because we could just get a cable internet instead.

That night I went online with my cell phone hooked up to my computer and set up a cable installation for the next Tuesday. Time Warner cable came and did the install just like they said they would on Tuesday the 28th and my service works great. As far as I am concerned I will never deal with Fairpoint again, and I will make sure that everyone I know is told about how bad their service is. As I have told this story to other people I have heard other tales of horrible service from Fairpoint coming from many different people. Verizon (who we had in the area previously) was never great to deal with but they were light years ahead of this joke of a company with regards to customer service and service in general.