Major phone service disruptions on Chicago’s West Side this month will not signal another slide into chaos by Ameritech, the firm’s top executives told state regulators Tuesday.
The Aug. 2 cloudburst knocked out service for about 14,000 Chicago customers in Humboldt Park and Ukrainian Village. More than half of them had to wait more than a day to regain service, Carrie Hightman, president of Ameritech Illinois, reported to the Illinois Commerce Commission Tuesday.
“This was an extraordinary situation,” Hightman said. “In some places there was water three feet above street level.”
She said that service has now been restored to everyone afflicted by storm outages. Even though Ameritech does not believe the state’s new telecommunications law requires it to provide refunds to customers affected by extreme weather, the firm will provide credits to customers who lost phone service for extended periods, Hightman said.
State regulations provide that Ameritech must restore service to 95 percent of its customers within 24 hours of an outage. Because many people waited weeks to get service restored last year, the firm paid $30 million for failing to meet that standard.
Even though Ameritech faltered in July and probably will miss meeting the standard in August, it will do so for the year and avoid paying another $30 million fine, the firm’s chief executive, Edward Mueller, vowed before the ICC.
Mueller was put in charge of Ameritech about a year ago by its parent, SBC Communications Inc., after regulators across the five-state Midwest region served by Ameritech held special joint meetings denouncing the firm’s service.
“We have made remarkable progress since last year,” Mueller told the ICC, but he acknowledged “eating humble pie” by having to report to regulators periodically to assure them that Ameritech’s service is going to get better.
“We want to return to a situation where the Illinois Commerce Commission, the legislature and the customers feel that Ameritech is a good, first-class company,” Mueller said.
Hightman said that Ameritech now has more network technicians than at any time in recent history and that it spent $1 billion last year and another $1 billion this year to improve its network infrastructure.
Hightman, who joined Ameritech in April after serving as an attorney for many of Ameritech’s competitors, said the phone giant “has been playing catch-up” to improve customer service.
She said that when a service technician fails to keep an appointment, it amounts to a broken promise to the customer.
“We know we need to improve in this area,” she said. “We’re committed to doing so. We’re not there yet. I know we must earn back your trust and respect.”
After firing several questions at the Ameritech executives, the regulators expressed relief that phone service is better than it was last year.
“Your numbers look good,” said Edward Hurley, who chairs the ICC’s telecommunications policy committee. “You missed the standard in July and probably will again in August, but it sounds like you’re not on a downward slope.”
“Absolutely,” said Ameritech’s Mueller.
ICC Chairman Richard Mathias said that Ameritech “has improved from its subterranean levels of a year ago.”
