PSC Opens Investigation into Liberty Mobile Amid Migration Concerns

Weeks after Liberty Wireless was grilled by lawmakers over the ongoing disruption being caused by its migration efforts, the company’s new country manager Ravindra Maywahlall faced similar tough questioning from the Public Services Commission on Tuesday.

PSC Executive Director Sandra Satori told commissioners that the agency had been deluged with customer complaints, and had, prior to a January meeting with Liberty representatives, also surveyed social media platforms to understand what former AT&T customers who had undergone the transition had to say. According to the findings of PSC staff, complaints included the quality of incoming and outgoing calls, delayed texts, dropped calls and area coverage issues. “Service issues continued even after the customers received system upgrades,” Ms. Satori noted, “including increased spam notifications, and issues with number portability.”

She recommended to commissioners that they “open a docket to monitor and investigate Liberty’s acquisition of AT&T, the migration process and system upgrades in addition to the quality of wireless service in the territory.”

PSC Commissioner Laura Nichols-Samms, herself a newly migrated Liberty customer, described her own experience with the process, saying that many pre-migration messages were delivered in Spanish. “Luckily, I do speak Spanish. But that’s a problem, because a lot of people don’t.” When she was undergoing the migration process, she disclosed that she lost connectivity. “My system got cut out. I didn’t have service for a whole day,” which she said necessitated a trip from St. John to Liberty’s St. Thomas office, where she met a line of people experiencing the same issue. She said that the issues with network quality, which customers had been experiencing before the network migration, “seems like it’s gotten worse.”