FairPoint hearings begin in northern New England

It must be unpleasant to be a captive subscriber to a nearly defunct LEC. This is what the Hawaiians are coming ever close to experiencing since Verizon sold off the former GTE unit to the Carlyle Group.

I would guess that the state will step in to prevent any interruptions. I have a friend; retired from GTE like myself, has been doing contract work for the Hawaiian company, he said that the states utilities commission is watching the situation very closely.

State regulation over there wax and wanes.

In any case, residential and even small business subscribers are going to wireless faster than most places because of the issues.

GTE really had things in pretty good shape when Verizon came in. Verizon seemed to carry on quite well but they apparently disliked the lack of intra-island toll more than GTE.

A pin collecting friend of mine who moved over to Maui several years ago had a DSL problem. He contacted me since he know I had worked for GTE. I made a few calls and got things moving, they replaced some cable and that took care of the problems.

GTE did a lot of work on updating the CO's, after they took it over in

1967. I went over there on loan from the California Company a few time and we did a lot of updates. I know there was some problems when GTE told ITT that they were taking over the LD services; what was strange is we were also updating ITT's systems in other areas, I spend 6 months in St. Thomas and St. Croix, nice work.

The first thing that Verizon did was start getting rid of areas where they were not the major service; which was stupid since those areas made the company a great deal of money. GTE also had huge amount of money in the bank from selling its Consumer Electronics divisions.

The error was allowing the company being sold to a non telecom company who was only interested in getting as much money as they could without spending anything. As far as I know the inter island toll is still controlled by Verizon.