Back in February, Frontier Communications and Verizon announced a massive deal where Verizon sold broadband, cable TV, and voice markets in California, Texas, and Florida to Frontier. Millions of customers came along with the sale, and they were supposed to be switched from Verizon to Frontier on April 1. Considering how well the switch went, that wasn’t a good date to choose.

We started hearing rumblings even before the changeover about how many customers had no idea that it was coming. Reader Kyle explained that he happened to see something about it on Reddit, and called Verizon to find out when the change would happen. The employee he spoke to reassured him. “I was told that the shift wouldn’t occur until late April or May, and that I would get ‘plenty of notice’,” he wrote to Consumerist.

He didn’t receive any direct notifications from Verizon or Frontier until Easter Sunday, less than a week before the service change, when he received an email.

He’s not the only one: we heard from other customers who had heard nothing about the a Dallas-area customer sent an letter to the local paper complaining about the abrupt changeover. “My landline telephone, Internet and TV services are now with Frontier,” he wrote. “I’ve never heard of Frontier. I thought it was a prank until other customers I know received the same email.”

Even if they missed the announcement entirely, customers might have noticed when the changeover resulted in outages in many of the new Frontier markets. Here’s how Frontier’s nationwide map looked DownDetector.com looked on Tuesday afternoon. Frontier’s own outage map shows that customers in California are still reporting outages.

Also, some customers were told that they might have to wait a few weeks for video on demand service to be restored, even if their TV, Internet, and phone service are all working.

The Stamford Advocate, Frontier’s hometown newspaper, reported that the company apologized to customers this morning. “Given the size and scope of this transaction, some of our customers experienced service disruptions,” the company said in a statement e-mailed to media outlets. “This is not the result we intended, and we apologize to our customers experiencing any problems.”

This acquisition is massive, doubling Frontier’s customer base overnight. We have to wonder how many of those customers they’ll keep after this, but most Americans have few choices for our cable and broadband service.

Frontier apologizes to new Verizon customers [Stamford Advocate]
In giant tech transfers, ‘problems are inevitable’ [Stamford Advocate]

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