More lines, a few additional angry customers and a spate of consumer spending marked the next round of Alltel customers moving to the AT&T network in Durango on Tuesday.

“We had 15,000 phones go live last night and 65,000 go live in the last week,” an AT&T representative told a handful of people waiting in line at the Durango AT&T store near Walmart.

Shortly after the store opened at 9 a.m., the line of customers hoping to have their phones fixed or make a purchase had already grown to an estimated 45-minute wait.

“There have been some isolated issues (with service), but from what I’m hearing, things are going really well,” AT&T spokeswoman Erika Ulring said.

Residents have long awaited the switch, which AT&T officials said will happen in staggered waves over the next month. Since the company purchased Alltel’s assets in the area in 2009, AT&T “invested significantly” to bring the transition and rebranding effort to fruition, a company news release this week said, and it more than doubled the company’s coverage area in Colorado.

Kristin Russel, Colorado secretary of technology and chief information officer, lauded the company’s investment in broadband in the state, saying the work will “keep our state moving forward and help build stronger rural communities.”

But for some new AT&T customers, the wait and promises of better service ended in frustration.

“I didn’t figure this would go smoothly,” Ben Morris, owner of Mountain Heating and Air, said as he stood in line at a local AT&T store because his family’s two Alltel phones went dead Tuesday morning, but the corresponding AT&T phones didn’t go live.

An upset Robert Kerr, who lives east of Durango, said he completely lost service at his home in the transition. Kerr was told a tower is planned to be erected in his area in the future, but his only options today are to invest several hundred dollars in equipment that could be hard-wired to his home or be released from his new AT&T contract to seek phone service with another company.

Resident Kathryn Eppich said her new AT&T phone also doesn’t have service in many places her Alltel phone did, including at her home.

“I’m bummed about my house,” Eppich said. “That’s a huge issue since we all depend on our cellphones so much now.”

Ulring called such cases “isolated” and said company officials would need to research the specific circumstances of those customers to understand what is causing the problems.

In the meantime, the frustrations have caused a boon to business for AT&T’s main Durango competitor, Verizon Wireless.

“It’s definitely caused an increase in business,” said Greg Huster, an employee at the Verizon Wireless store adjacent to the Walmart-area AT&T store in Durango.

With cellphones now a critical communication tool for many families and businesses, service interruptions associated with the Alltel-to-AT&T switch have many “fed up” and turning to Verizon for service, Huster said.

“People can only handle so much,” he said.

Another factor potentially influencing residents’ decision about cell service: AT&T lost its exclusive claim to the iPhone earlier this year when Verizon announced it, too, would offer the popular phone.

Whatever the outcome, the switch-over is keeping everyone in the business busy.

The local Radio Shack store on Main Avenue has seen a jump in traffic connected with the AT&T transition, said sales associate Bernard Wolsieffer.

The store officially became an AT&T retailer last month (other major carriers it is a retailer for are Sprint and T-Mobile). During the last week, customers have kept store employees hustling as they look to purchase and replace accessories for their new AT&T phones, Wolsieffer said.

hscofield@durangoherald.com

This story has been changed to correct the carriers for which AT&T is a retailer. Also, a headline for this story was corrected to reflect that 65,000 AT&T phones have gone live so far in what will be a month-long transition of Alltel’s assets and customers in the area to AT&T. The headline error occurred during editing.