Ah the NBI market. Total headache. I've seen multiple bad customer experiences with people trying to combine numbers from different markets.

This is something I wish AT&T would do a massive overhaul of their billing system for.

For any nonemployees looking for a little background:

Each account has a "market." Depending on where you are that market might comprise several states or just a portion of a state. You cannot mix numbers from different markets unless the account is in the NBI market.

NBI is a market for national business accounts. It stands for national billing instance. You can combine numbers from any markets you want onto an NBI account.

The whole "market" thing is a leftover artifact from the days of regional plans. Your "market" determined your home area.

Now granted there are still some grandfathered regional plans out there and there are even some active regional plans that are part of the lifeline program. But i think AT&T would be doing their employees and customers a solid if they just abandoned the whole market thing and made all accounts national.

The problem with the NBI market is that the average customer service employee has no idea what it is. I've run into many a customer who has been told that it's impossible to merge numbers from different markets onto one account.

The policies on it actually say that its only available to consumer accounts if there is a need to merge numbers from different markets onto one account. Which is really the only reason anyone would ever want to do it anyway.

The department who can do an nbi move is called national business ordering.