PROVO — David and Nancy Nay have two teenage daughters who are, their father said, "perfect baby-sitting age."

But the girls were temporarily off the baby-sitting market in Provo's Grandview neighborhood earlier this month because the family's iProvo Internet telephone service was out for a full week.

"A couple of people came up to us at church and said, "We can never get ahold of you,' " David Nay said. "I think my daughters have lost a few babysitting jobs."

Nay and others suffering from phone service outages didn't seem too put out by the hiccups in the transition from original iProvo service provider HomeNet to newcomer Veracity, the company that bought all of HomeNet's phone customers. They're just happy HomeNet is gone.

"Their phone service was horrible," Nancy Nay said.

But HomeNet also left behind larger hurdles to the transition than were expected by officials at Veracity and the other new service provider, MStar. Those hurdles have led directly to the phone outages, Veracity president Drew Peterson said.

"Most of the customers who were out a week were out mostly because of a lack of information provided to us via HomeNet," he said.

"Others experienced intermittent delays that stemmed from HomeNet's older technology."

Peterson said Veracity would compensate iProvo customers who had outages, but even without that knowledge, residents said iProvo customer service has improved.

"Compared to HomeNet, Veracity worked around the clock to fix it," said Grant Russell, a Grandview resident whose phone was dead for a few hours one day and then was out overnight a few days later. "They bent over backwards to be helpful."

The iProvo project began in early 2004 when Russell's was one of 250 Grandview neighborhood homes to test the system. In December, HomeNet launched triple-play services — cable television, Internet and phone — to a small portion of the city in the first of what will be six phases scheduled to be completed by spring 2006.

Provo's City Council voted to pay for the project with a $40 million bond.

Last month, MStar purchased all of HomeNet's cable television customers and many of its Internet customers. The company is signing up customers for its Internet phone service but it could take up to three weeks before it actually goes into service. First the company has to adjust to iProvo's phone switches.

"Our phone service is working really well on the Utopia network," MStar president Jon Hansen said. "Provo uses a different telephone adapter. We needed to certify to use it and make sure our equipment works."

The company had told potential customers phone service would be available this week, but Hansen said MStar is waiting until it's completely ready.