ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 18, 1996 TAG: 9602160016
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Communications
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS
Ten days ago, President Clinton signed into law a bill that promises to vastly expand the range of choices for telephone, television cable, computer and other telecommunications services for many American consumers.
The Old Dominion, however, stepped out of character and ahead of Congress in bringing competition to some sectors of the telecommunications industry. As a result, Virginia consumers may see more choices for some services sooner than residents of other states.
The new federal law encourages competition by letting telecommunications companies get into each other's businesses. For instance, the law allows phone companies providing local service to begin selling television-cable and long-distance services. Long-distance phone carriers and cable companies can offer local telephone services.
To help ensure that Bell Atlantic and other "Baby Bells" created by the breakup of AT&T don't continue as monopolies, the law requires that they have competition for their local phone service before they can offer long-distance service in their own service areas. In meeting that requirement, Bell Atlantic has gotten some help from the Virginia legislature.
Not waiting for Congress to act, the 1995 General Assembly changed Virginia law to allow competition for local telephone service effective Jan. 1.
The State Corporation Commission has scheduled April 30 public hearings on separate applications by two companies seeking to provide competitive local telephone service in Virginia. MCI Corp. of Washington, D.C., a long-distance provider, wants to offer local phone service throughout the state; and MFS Intelenet of Virginia, a subsidiary of MFS Communications Co. of Omaha, Neb., plans to provide local service to businesses and governments in areas of Virginia now served by Bell Atlantic and GTE South Inc.
MCI considers Virginia one of its primary markets for local service and plans to offer it competitively in the state by the end of 1997, said Bernie Tylor, a company spokesman.
Steve Ingish, a spokesman for MFS, said his company would be prepared to begin offering service within six months to a year after the state gives the OK, depending on how much technical work is required and how negotiations of interconnection issues with existing service providers go.
Virginia is one of about 25 states that passed or was in the process of passing pro-competitive laws before Congress enacted its new telecommunications law Feb. 1, Ingish said.
The Virginia law requires the SCC to act within six months on a company's application for local service, but that period may be extended. The law allows customers to keep the same phone number within certain geographic areas regardless of whether they change local service providers.
According to SCC spokesman Ken Schrad, Cox Communications, the cable television provider in the Roanoke Valley and Tidewater, is expected to file an application to provide local phone service in the Norfolk area in the next few weeks.
Cox has equipment in place that would enable it to provide local phone service in the Roanoke Valley, but has made no decision yet whether to do that. "We're looking at the options and opportunities," said Sharon Davies, a Roanoke Valley Cox spokeswoman.
In addition to opening local phone service to competition, the SCC last fall opened the long-distance business within the state's smaller calling regions to competition.
For instance, a long-distance call made from Roanoke to Blacksburg in the past has normally been handled by Bell Atlantic, the local telephone company. However, a customer now can have AT&T or some other long-distance carrier handle that call by dialing the carrier's access code before dialing the number.
In another example of the coming competition for communications services, Colorado-based U S West has filed an application with the SCC to provide high-speed data transmission service within Virginia. A hearing date on the application hasn't been set yet, Schrad said.
With federal law throwing the whole telecommunications arena open to competition, consumers eventually should be able to choose from a variety of companies, each providing a range of services that the companies may sell at a discount when the services are packaged together. In this one-stop shopping scenario, consumers might sign up with a single company for their telephone, cellular phone, television cable and on-line access services and receive one bill each month.
Some have predicted that such competition is many months if not years away, but it may be on us sooner than we would expect. Bell Atlantic, for instance, announced Tuesday that the company will begin offering long-distance service in five states outside its service area, including North and South Carolina, by as early as the end of June.
Bell Atlantic, which wants to provide long-distance service nationwide, can begin providing the service in its own service area once it has competition for its local phone service. With applications for local service from MCI and MFS already in the works, Bell Atlantic could be offering long-distance service in Virginia within a year or two.
Within possibly a few months in Northern Virginia and Tidewater and a couple of years in Roanoke, Bell Atlantic will begin offering a video-on-demand service that will provide customers with movies on their television sets whenever they want them. The company won the right in federal court to provide the service even before the telecommunications bill was passed.
Eventually, after the company replaces its "twisted-pair" copper wires with fiber-optic and coaxial cable, Bell Atlantic wants to provide in Roanoke and elsewhere a fully interactive telecommunications service with hundreds of television channels and other features such as shopping and banking from home. The company already has such a service up and running in Dover Township, N.J.
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