The Ordeal of Changing from Land Line to VOIP Phone Service Part 2

From the customer point of view, the procedure for switching from a land line provider to a VOIP provider is this:

1. Apply to the land line provider (ATT) to split your service, so you have one account for voice and one for DSL.
2. ATT splits the account, giving the a new account number, which is actually a phone number, to the DSL account.
3. ATT lets OOMA know this has been done and releases the phone number to OOMA, which enters it in their database. (Note: When you start the OOMA account, you are given a phone number, but this is replaced by your old phone number when OOMA enters that number in their database. This means that, if you log on to their web site, your account number will have changed; you can't get on with the original phone number: a little gotcha.)
4. From this point on, ATT will bill you the unbundled DSL rate and OOMA will bill you for taxes. Of course OOMA has an optional premium service that costs so much per month, but I'll that is a different topic

Sounds pretty clean doesn't it? Not. When you got the new DSL account, did you remember to ask for your ATT email to be moved over to the new ATT account? Oh, it wasn't in the instructions. Too bad. You have to ask. Then comes the nightmare.

I'm not real clear on what kicks off what, but ATT has to do two things:

1. Create a service ticket to come to your house and do something with your phone service at the external box- Committed time to complete: 48 hours, but that doesn't mean a thing. It seems like when 48 hours is up the ticket is closed, whether or not it has been done.
2. Create another service ticket to move your email user id over to your new stand alone DSL account. Why is it not connect to the DSL account in the first place? Maybe you'd better ask the president of the carrier that question. Again, commitment is 48 hours, but same actual criteria. What do they have to do? 5 minutes of work entering it in a database.

So, its been 10 days elapsed time and 5 days I've been fighting the system. 3 days for moving the user id over. They closed the original ticket but didn't do the work. But they complain about overlapping tickets, so you get to wait 48 hours, then spend hours talking to different technical people (at level 3 no less) to find out why you can't log on even though you can ping anything (meaning the internet is there, but you can't get to the DNS servers to get to any site via a browser). I talked to 4 people over the course of this time, each with a different approach to the problem.

Finally I talked to someone who researched the problem and discovered that the ticket to move the email was closed but that some database had not been modified. I expect/think that the problem is that the merger between our old phone provider and the new one resulted in data systems that don't talk to one another. So people have to manually cross the gap.

The outcome next...