The PUC will hear complaints about Frontier Communications’ telephone and Internet service during Wednesday’s hearing

Editor’s Note: Originally released June 28.

The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) plans to hold a hearing on Wednesday at George A. Smith Middle School in Eden Township to address complaints about Frontier Communications’ telephone and Internet services to Quarryville customers.

The PUC has already held hearings in Tioga, Bradford and Wyoming counties following hundreds of customer complaints about service disruptions and difficulties getting help.

The Lancaster County hearing was formally requested by Republican House Leader Bryan Cutler, Township of Drumore, and State Representative John Lawrence, R-West Grove, Chester County.

Frontier, a subsidiary of the Commonwealth Telephone Company, is the provider of telephone and internet services for most of southern Lancaster and parts of southern Chester counties.

The border has been the subject of many complaints from our residents for years, Cutler wrote to the PUC. Our residents have shared with us reports of unusable landline phones or internet service that persisted for months, continued billing from Frontier even with non-existent service, routinely delayed repair dates that (have) lasted for months, etc. Due to these many concerns, we would like to add a further hearing here for our residents to relay their experiences to the PUC.

As of 2020, Frontier served about 104,000 access lines at 79 exchanges, according to the PUC complaint.

Serious security issues

On January 9, the state’s Office of Consumer Advocate and Office of Small Business Advocate filed a joint complaint against Frontier with the PUC after receiving nearly 300 complaints from residents in Bradford, Sullivan, Susquehanna, Tioga and Wyoming counties.

Consumer advocate Patrick M. Cicero said in the filings that the issues raise serious and fundamental safety concerns for affected consumers.

The joint complaint concerns current and persistent service issues in the Frontiers service territory, including protracted and recurring outages, line noise and other service quality issues, difficulty reaching customer service representatives, and difficulty obtaining a satisfactory response to their outages and other service complaints.

How to speak in court

An in-person public hearing in the Frontier complaint case will be held at 6:00 pm on July 19 at George A. Smith Middle School, 645 Kirkwood Pike, Eden Township.

PUC Administrative Law Judges Steven K. Haas and John M. Coogan will preside over the hearing.

Those wishing to testify in person at the public hearing are encouraged to pre-register with the Office of Consumer Advocate prior to the hearing. Those who pre-register and provide the information listed below will be called to testify at the hearing in the order in which they pre-registered.

To pre-register, contact the Office of Consumer Advocate by phone at 800-684-6560 or by email at [email protected] and provide:

• Name and surname.

• The date and time of the public hearing at which you wish to testify.

• A telephone number where you can be reached before the hearing if you need to be contacted.

• Email address if you have one.

• If you require an interpreter to attend the hearing, the language of the interpreter.

Offer testimony in an input public hearing

The PUC offers tips on how to attend a public hearing, including:

• Prepare in advance what you are going to say. While it’s not required, you may want to write your own statement, which can be read.

• Any formal testimony offered during the hearing will form part of the record on which the PUC will issue its final decision.

• Keep in mind that stakeholders may want to ask you a question to clarify something you said.