The rebranding and partial sell-off of a legacy Wisconsin phone provider continues this week at SOS, as Jan Loomis is now happy to report that its phone and internet service is back up and running after a month-long outage.
Loomis, 84, of Windsor, is the third person since August to contact SOS about problems with the landline service previously offered by CenturyLink. Like the other two, she had had the same landline number for ten years or more.
Loomis said its landline and internet service from Charlotte, North Carolina-based Brightspeed stopped working in mid-September.
Brightspeed is a new company launched in October 2022 to bring high-speed fiber optic internet to rural and suburban areas across most of the eastern half of the United States. It also bought a tranche of customer accounts from Lumen, which in 2020 became the new name for a revamped, new brand and reportedly new destination: CenturyLink.
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Loomis used her cell phone to call Brightspeed several times about the outages, receiving no answers or confusing answers.
“I have called Brightspeed every weekday for the past three weeks,” she says.
SOS was already working to provide 87-year-old Peggy Wyttenbach with a regular billing statement for her Brightspeed service when Loomis reached out, and Brightspeed spokesperson Katie Parker was also happy to take on the new challenge.
Three days after SOS reached out, she said Brightspeed technicians looked into Loomis’ situation and discovered she had requested her number be sent to another service provider.
“That request has been met,” she said on October 11. “However, after speaking directly to the customer, she asked that we restore service, and we are now porting the number back. She should restore Brightspeed phone service soon.
With a few hiccups, this was more or less correct, as evidenced by texts from Loomis, who kept SOS informed about the search for service success.
She said that on October 12 she remembered telling Brightspeed that she intended to switch to TDS, but also that she had changed her mind and informed Brightspeed that she wanted to remain a customer of hers.
On Oct. 17, a Brightspeed technician arrived at her home and got the phone, but no internet, working again, she said. But four days later she reported that she was able to get back online and “everything seems to be working.”
In a statement expressing understanding of the frustrations of their “customers when they experience service disruptions,” Brightspeed said:
“We followed our standard process of releasing the (phone) number because the other carrier is responsible for authentication and authorization. The customer confirmed that she had been in contact with the other carrier, but had not agreed to a switch to another provider. As soon as we became aware of the problem, we restored service.”
Delays in reconnecting Patricia Gregory were “a result of the confluence of many factors,” TDS communications manager Missy Kellor said.
Washington’s attorney general filed suit against Brown Paper Tickets on September 30, alleging violations of the state’s consumer protection law.
Schweiss said that at one point Frontier claimed he was actually a company and referred him to a company representative in Alaska.
TDS said the service would not be available by the end of this month — and Schweiss wouldn’t get his $25 back either.
Mills said AT&T told him there was nothing it could do to stop the messages he was getting for a stranger whose last name also happens to be Mills.
