Although telecom service providers in general have suggested they will spend 10% to 15% less this year than they did in 2008, their capital expenditures for the first quarter appear to be down about 20%, UBS analysts said in a research note today, citing discussions with industry sources.
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Fairpoint Communications customers in New Hampshire lost DSL service today, according to ComputerWorld magazine. A reporter there who lost service says he was told by a Fairpoint customer service rep that “service had been out for the entire state of New Hampshire this morning and was still out as of 12:30 p.m. Eastern time.”

However, a Fairpoint spokesperson told Telephony this afternoon there were no widespread outages in New Hampshire today. “We have about 80 individual reports of interruptions for various reasons,” the spokesperson said in an email. “Those are being handled on a case by case basis.”

Those service interruptions come the day after Fairpoint submitted a plan to Maine regulators for how it will correct service problems that have plagued the company since it transferred former Verizon customers to its own back office and billing systems following an acquisition of network assets in three states. Earlier this month, Fairpoint reported having quickly resolved email problems that followed the systems cutover but admitted it needed to keep working to remedy order flow and billing problems.