The Nebraska Public Service Commission will take testimony from customers of 3 phone companies – CenturyLink, Windstream and Frontier – about service problems in a hearing Oct. 26 from 10-4:00 at Metro Community College in Omaha.
The PSC has received more than 200 complaints of outages and poor customer service from the 3 companies with most coming from the Omaha and Valentine areas.
Commission Chairman Dan Watermeier says “Telephone service quality issues are something we are always concerned with.”
Most of the complaints that led to next month’s hearing dealt with long service outages, slow response to service calls, and an inability to talk to a customer service agent.
One complaint from a Gretna customer said it took 8 days for a service technician to respond to an outage while one in Harvard reported an even longer wait – 13 days – and that the technician didn’t correct the problem.
Watermeier says “the length of time it takes carriers to resolve consumer problems and their reluctance to repair or replace aging infrastructure needs to be addressed.”
This is the first Public Service Commission hearing on service issues in more than 3 years. The last was in April 2019 in the Panhandle at Oshkosh.