LAKEVILLE– When there’s a problem with their cable-television service, Lakeville residents call AT&T– whose nearest customer center is in New Bedford, almost 20 miles away. Just a few years ago, they could have gotten help from an office much closer, in next-door Middleborough, but MediaOne shut it down shortly before being taken over by AT&T, and merged the two offices. The New Bedford facility can handle more calls and respond more effectively to questions about the company’s cable, phone, and Internet services, explained John Maher, AT&T’s regional director of government affairs, at a February town meeting. “That’s the way the business has gone. It’s more efficient to run large call centers than small call centers,” he said.

Lakeville resident Tom Cirignano might disagree. AT&T put him on hold for 15 minutes one Saturday morning last November. He hung up, tried again, and stayed on hold for another 45 minutes. “After an hour, I was so boiling mad I’m glad someone didn’t answer,” because, he says, he would have screamed at them.

Bob Marshall, chair of the Lakeville Cable Commission, has heard lots of similar complaints. “Years ago, when we first started with cable, we worked with a company named Continental Cablevision”–subsequently bought out by MediaOne– “and it worked very, very well in town,” he recalls. “People were satisfied with it, and the service was close to home. One thing I’ve discovered, the farther away you have to call to get service, the harder it becomes.”

So much harder that Lakeville’s board of selectmen, spurred on by resident complaints, has decided to do something about it. When AT&T renegotiated its cable contract in January 2001, the town insisted on including a provision–already required by federal law–guaranteeing that customers be able to reach a live representative within 30 seconds of connecting with the service center 90 percent of the time. The board of selectmen says AT&T has fallen short of this goal, and it has held several hearings this year to investigate alleged contract violations.

The board could eventually take its case to the Federal Communications Commission, but the selectmen are trying to resolve things without appealing to Washington. In theory, they can assess penalties on AT&T for every day since the first letter of complaint was filed from Lakeville, on November 14. But the maximum fine is $200 per day, a pittance to a corporate giant with a market capitalization of more than $52 billion. (In late March, the selectmen fined AT&T $25,000.)

Lakeville may be small, but its 4,000 or so households are still attractive to AT&T. The standard monthly cable bill in Lakeville is now $37.57. Pricing for digital cable is even steeper, rang-ing from $45 to $85 per month. If customers also subscribe to AT&T’s high-speed Internet service, they pay an extra $40.95 per month, provided they’re willing to pay the utility company $199 up front to purchase a cable modem. If not, their monthly bill, including a leased modem, clocks in at $50.95. Add that to regular long-distance telephone bills and AT&T’s services can drain as much as $200 from a household budget each month.

Some larger cities, such as Somerville and Boston, have competing cable providers, but it’s tough to convince companies to move into a small market already dominated by AT&T. (No other cable provider offers services here, but residents do have access to satellite TV.) Says selectman Richard LaCamera, “They’ve really got a monopoly, especially in southeastern Massachusetts. To say we’re going to walk away from them? We can’t do that because no one else can provide the service at this point in time, and one of the problems is they certainly know it.”

Some of the products at stake–including high-speed Internet access and digital cable–were unimaginable only a few years ago. But Lakeville and other Bay State communities have come to depend on them. They’ve also discovered that new technology can bring new headaches.

In December, the Plymouth Board of Selectmen sent a letter to that town’s provider, Adelphia Cable, alleging the same problem as Lakeville, excessive waits to reach a customer service representative. That same month, officials from Berkley, Brockton, Hanover, and Mansfield testified about AT&T’s alleged customer service problems at a hearing held by the state Department of Telecommunications and Energy. They also criticized AT&T’s standard cable rates–ranging from $38.07 per month in Berkley to $43.49 in Brockton–as too high.

At the western end of the state, some customers are more concerned about what they’re not getting for their money. State Rep. Shaun Kelly (R-Dalton) complains that some cable providers in the Berkshires carry network affiliates based in Albany, the closest major media market, but none in Boston- meaning that Massachu -setts viewers get no news about their own state government. He’s appealing to federal lawmakers to prohibit this practice.

In Lakeville, Marshall compares the cable commission’s showdown with AT&T to the biblical story of David and Goliath, but says the town is pressing its case. Customer-response time may be the issue at hand, but it’s also symbolic of one town’s discomfort with its new, small-er role in the telecommunications universe. As consolidation reshapes many industries serving municipalities, from cable television to hospital care, smaller towns could find themselves with less clout that they can exercise by regulatory means. That makes the Lakeville-AT&T dustup a case of a town trying to preserve its autonomy–and dignity–against Big Business. After all, the Lakeville cable franchise agreement is a legally binding contract, and the company, some residents charge, is ignoring it.

Lakeville’s cable problems didn’t begin with AT&T. In August 1997, cable-commission chairman Marshall tried to call MediaOne’s customer service line. “I couldn’t get through,” he says. “I tried later, and I couldn’t get through, time after time.” Soon, people in town began coming up to him to report similar problems. But Marshall says the phenomenon intensified when AT&T took over in August 2000. That prompted the town to insert the FCC customer-service requirement into its own cable contract.

This move had little effect, town leaders say. The board of selectmen met with company officials on November 5 to discuss customer-service problems; nine days later, they sent a letter charging AT&T with violating its contract with the town. On February 11, about 20 townspeople gathered under humming fluorescent lights at the town senior center to hear AT&T’s defense.

AT&T’s Maher freely acknowledged past problems, which he blamed on industry consolidation. In January 2001, AT&T changed customer bills to a standard format, hoping to simplify the different billing systems inherited from their purchases of MediaOne and various Time Warner and Cablevision properties over the preceding two years. It was “the largest single billing conversion in the history of cable TV in this area,” according to Maher. But it hardly simplified anything. Because of customer confusion–and company billing errors–the call volume increased, especially in the last half of 2001. Maher admits that customer service had to suffer, since a mere 3 percent increase in calls reduces the percentage of calls answered on time to 76 percent.”We admitted we had challenges here in Lakeville with our response time, but we’re doing our best to ensure our customers have a good experience,” he told the senior-center crowd.

The billing changeover is now complete, Maher continued, and in the last week of January, the company’s on-time response rate in Massachusetts and New Hampshire was a near-miss 87 percent. Selectman Chawner Hurd was unmoved. “My understanding is that 90 percent is not a goal, but a contractual obligation,” said Hurd. But Maher urged the board not to take action until the figures from the first quarter of 2002 were released at the end of March; a meeting to discuss the matter was planned for March 25.

AT&T has 1.7 million cable customers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, where the telephone-turned-cable behemoth serves 305 towns and cities. Because the company keeps only regional records, AT&T officials say they can’t furnish Lakeville-specific statistics on customer response time. Even the figures they did provide were thrown into question when one town resident remarked at the February 11 meeting that he had timed the automated message that greets all callers, and it clocked in at 75 seconds–itself a violation of the 30-second rule. “I don’t want to get into the legalese of when a connection is made,” responded Maher.

Some residents express frustration that their calls aren’t always answered even by the closest company representatives, in New Bedford. AT&T frequently routes calls to centers across the state, in Allston, Chelmsford, and Malden. One man who testified at the February 11 meeting said he talked to a representative in Florida, where the company outsources some of its work. Maher acknowledged that roughly 30 percent of AT&T’s customer-service employees in the New England region work for outside contractors.

Jennifer Khoury, a spokeswoman for AT&T, understands that “maybe some people don’t like talking to someone from Florida or the other part of the state,” but she stresses that outsourcing allows AT&T to be more flexible–and responsive. “If we have a snowstorm, we can call our partners and say, ‘You need to pick up an additional volume of calls on that day,'” she says.

Dissatisfaction with customer service has, perhaps inevitably, led to complaints about pricing. “They have rate increases going out of style,” says LaCamera, pointing to two in the past year. Says Marshall, “People are paying a lot of money for this service, and cable bills go [nowhere] but up. People are tired of it. If they pay the money, they want the service, and they haven’t been getting it, in my opinion.”

AT&T officials insist their rates are competitive, however. In nearby Plymouth, for instance, Adelphia charges $42.95 per month for a standard cable package–more than $5 higher than Lakeville’s standard rate. AT&T also points to the community benefits they’ve provided in Lakeville, though most of these services, such as connecting every school and library to the Internet for free, began when MediaOne was in charge. (MediaOne also rebuilt the town’s entire cable system in 1998 to allow for high-speed Internet access and digital cable.) Town officials, they say, should make allowances for temporary glitches, and recognize their good-faith effort to improve. Noting that AT&T has significantly increased its number of customer-service representatives over the last two years, Maher says, “We’re working toward coming into compliance with the contract….We just have to get a little better, and that’s what our focus is.”

AT&T is currently poised for another merger, with Philadelphia-based Comcast, which some in Lakeville fear will result in another billing changeover–and more customer-service delays. Khoury says it’s premature to speculate on the Comcast deal, which is merely a proposal at this point. But, she notes, “The decisions we’re making today and tomorrow will be with the best interests of the customer in mind. That’s a definite focus for us in 2002, improving customer care and service.”

Lakeville officials realize, with their meager ammunition of a $200-per-day fine against an international corporation, that they don’t have many options. But they hope their persistence on the customer service question will have an impact. Says selectman LaCamera, “We want the problem fixed, and we can’t let them do this forever.”

Dorie Clark is a freelance writer living in Somerville.