My small business runs on local telephone commerce and I’ve been an good ATT customer utilizing their “auto-pay” program where my credit card is billed at the beginning of each month with my current ATT business telephone charges.

Sometime in November of 2011, my credit card number ( the one used for these charges ) was hijacked on an internet site, cancelled, and was replaced by my bank.

I called ATT to give them my new credit card charge information on Feb. 7th of 2012 after noticing the bill was no longer correctly charged to the new account number. I spoke with three different operators, from three different departments at ATT, and after nearly an hour of repeating my story, I was able to confirm that they had correctly logged the current charge information, and had paid my outstanding charges to “current” status.

Imagine my surprise when on Friday morning 2-24-12, the business telephone service had been disconnected and my business customers were sending along messages that my business telephone numbers had been “disconnected”…!

I called ATT, ( making a fair guess at what had happed ) and after confirming that my bill was paid in full, and current, I asked to have my phone numbers turned back on, to which they flatly refused. I asked why, if it had been less than an hour since it was turned off, and their mistake and not mine, that they could not simply turn the phone number back on. They put me on hold a number of times for very extended periods ( 10-15 min without contact ) and I had to hang up and call again two separate times on Friday 2-24-12 to reestablish this same conversation , then asking for a supervisor each time. The people who I spoke with were unanimous in their obstinate refusal to address my simple question and each gave me the sequential run-around, person after person.

My business telephone service is now disconnected even when I was assured earlier in the month ( 2-07-12 ) that all of my telephone bills would be paid automatically from that point on.

This is not the kind of service a California service company should be providing their good customers and I believe the time has come for the California PUC to think about opening the state’s home and business telephone services to a broader competitive market as I believe ( after numerous similar experiences over the years with SBC, PAC-Bell and now ATT ) the same kind of abusive-non-response and self-serving attitude for the people who are each claiming to want to “Help you” with your telephone service issues. They invariably tie their customers into a continuous long drawn travail with numerous “departments” and unresponsive ranks of middle management muddle… I guess they are hoping most customers will simply give up and pay extra money to restore services that had been unreasonably discontinued.

Please help us make the telephone service provider for the State of California as fine as the State which grants it this valuable monopoly.