Changing phone billing
Several companies were unanimous in their assessment: if you have DSL service in California and want to change the name in which your underlying telephone service is billed, you will have a three-week DSL service outage. This is because of inadequacies in the way the line-sharing between DSL providers and local exchange carriers is set up.
You can't switch phone billing information while line-sharing with a DSL ISP is set up. (Why not?)
So you have to cancel the DSL service. This can be done almost immediately. Then it takes a week for the LEC to be informed that the DSL service has been shut off. (Why?)
Then you have to call the LEC to ask them to change the billing. The LEC will note your request immediately, but it takes a week for the LEC to make the change in its records. (Why?)
Then you have to call the DSL ISP and place a new order for DSL service. You supposedly can't do this inside the week when the LEC is changing its records, because the DSL order might be cancelled automatically if it were still pending when the LEC's internal change took effect. It then takes a week for the DSL ISP to activate your service. (Why?)
Note that the only benefit you get as a result of all these changes is that a single database entry in the phone company's computers has been corrected. But everyone agrees that there is no way that entry can be corrected without a three-week outage. (I don't know if this is true for California ILECs other than SBC.)
Imagine if another utility, like the electric company, had to shut off your service for weeks in order to correct your billing records.
