Residential And Business U-verse Phone Lines / Accounts At One Address

Hi Travis,

Thank you for your post.  I have confirmed with my Uverse team that you cannot have residential and business VOIP lines at the same address.  The only way to resolve that issue would be to have a different address; for example 123 Main Street and 123 Main Street, Unit A.  Kepp in mind, however that address would need to be verified and added by our National Address Filter group and may take a while.

Please let me know if you have further questions.

Thanks,

Nancy A

Social Media Manager

Thanks for your reply.  My question now is, what happens if the Post Office doesn't want to give you a "different address" just because one room of your home happens to also be your office?  As I stated, millions of people for literally decades now have home offices and have had both Residential and Business lines at one address with no problem whatsoever; why should it be any different with the advent of U-verse VOIP?  You can obviously bring the signal in with just the technicality of adding an "A" (or whatever) on the end of the address.  I'm loathe to believe that the U-verse planners have not foreseen this eventuality, especially since there will be a "forced" move off of POTS and onto U-verse VOIP for all "copper" customers (both Residential and Business) and more sooner than later.  Please advise further because my client is obviously not the only one facing this problem and the Post Office may not be inclined to go around changing people's addresses just so they can have a particular type of phone service (in this case, one that their livelihood depends on).

Hi Travis,

We are aware of the issue and apologize for the inconvenience.  Separate addresses would be the only way currently to ensure 2 different modems for the customer.  The customer would also need to have two drops from the terminal to the house.

Thank you,

Nancy A

Listen, I don't mean to be either unkind nor oblivious, but what you (and I don't mean "you personally" of course) are demanding is that people go get a commercial office somewhere in order to have a U-verse Business line and that's just not going to be possible in the vast majority of cases here. There is a reason that people have a Home Office to begin with, probably mostly financial but sometimes they're located in areas where there is simply no commercial office space available. And asking the Post Office to assign them a separate address is most likely not possible either for a whole host of reasons, with potential zoning complications being just one of them.  Apparently your Business customers who currently possess a POTS Business account in a Home Office are stuck with what they have for the time being (a shame if they want to jump ship over to U-verse) but when the time comes that they are forced to convert to a U-verse line (because the phone company is discontinuing POTS service in their area) somebody needs to give this some serious thought, policy-wise; I can tell you they're not (and probably can't) going to run out and rent some high-dollar commercial office space just to maintain a phone line that they've been mandated to switch to.  As for the "2 drops" thing that's a non-issue; nobody I know of would care if there was an extra fiber cable run to their premises, especially if it was a requirement of keeping their Business phone line.  This is a real problem and I (and probably millions of other Home Office users) will be waiting to see how AT&T deals with this situation.  As an aside, I've yet to hear the reason why AT&T is taking this position; obviously there's no technical reason why a premise can't have 2 physically-separate U-verse phone accounts, 1 Residential and 1 Business, if they are willing to accept 2 separate RGs and billing accounts.