By LYNN DOAN
Courant Staff Writer

Even as AT&T fights new government regulation in Connecticut, state officials and union workers are protesting what they say is the company's failure to meet existing service regulations.

More than 100 union workers, joined by the state's attorney general and consumer counsel, gathered Monday in front of AT&T's call center in Meriden to bring attention to the company's failure to repair out-of-service residential telephone lines in a timely fashion and to its poor customer service rankings the last two years.

State regulations require that 90 percent of out-of-service land line telephone repairs be done within 24 hours. AT&T completed an average of 65.5 percent of its repairs within 24 hours between April 2007 and March 2008, according to State Consumer Counsel Mary Healey.

Healey's office also said AT&T's customer service agents, who handle home phone, television and Internet service complaints, take the longest of all reporting companies to answer calls. That prompted the state Department of Public Utility Control to open an investigation into the company's quality ofservice in July.

"AT&T has been telling us, 'The customer rules,'" Healey said after Monday's rally, "but talk is cheap. Their actions speak louder than words, and their customers are not ruling."

The consumer counsel's complaint and the DPUC investigation comes as AT&T calls for less regulation of its business. The company ran into several regulatory hurdles launching its new U-verse television service, most recently a fight about the placement of refrigerator-size boxes on utility poles that deliver the service. The DPUC ruled last week that AT&T must get permission from neighbors, municipalities and state transportation officials before installing the boxes.

Chad Townes, vice president and general manager of AT&T East, said during a business conference last week: "We don't need policymakers stepping in and telling us how to do it or where to do it."

But Healey said Monday that the company's dismal record in abiding by service regulations only "points to the need for more regulation."

"We've got to get stronger regulatory oversight over them until they prove otherwise," she said.

During Monday's rally, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and members of Local 1298 of the Communications Workers of America urged AT&T to comply with state regulations by restoring some of the 1,000 customer service-related jobs the company has eliminated in recent years.

The company cut 200 call center jobs in Connecticut earlier this year and outsourced many of its customer service calls to a center in Ohio, union President William Henderson said.

"You can't send [calls] to Ohio and expect to have the same customer satisfaction as you would in Meriden, Conn.," said Henderson, who is an intervenor in the DPUC's investigation.

In addition to the longest wait times, the company had the highest percentage of calls abandoned by customers and the lowest percentage of calls answered within 60 seconds among all reporting companies.

Blumenthal, who is also an intervenor in the state case, described AT&T's service as an "absolutely appalling disrespect for consumers and disregard for the law."

"The company's eight-year uninterrupted record of failing minimum standards — including timely repair of nonfunctioning lines — is outrageous and unconscionable," he said. "AT&T needs to be taught how to answer its own phones and keep its lines working."

Complaints against the company prompted Gov. M. Jodi Rell to send a letter to AT&T Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson last month. In the letter, Rell encouraged the company to improve its customer service before state regulators force it to.

"The facts speak for themselves, and these facts are an insult to your customers," she said in the letter. "It is my sincere hope that these facts will spur positive action by AT&T in Connecticut."