AT&T to Offer Local Phone Service in North, South Carolina, Louisiana

Jan. 9–AT&T Corp. has entered the local residential telephone market in North Carolina, South Carolina and Louisiana.

The company said yesterday that it is offering competitively priced local-calling plans to residents in BellSouth’s service areas.

“North and South Carolinians and Louisianans now can reap the benefits of local competition by taking advantage of AT&T’s local calling plans,” said Kevin Crull, the senior vice president of AT&T Consumer.

Crull said that AT&T is “banking on regulatory decisions at the state level in the next nine months that will continue policies allowing consumers a competitive choice for local phone service.”

AT&T, which already provides residential local service to more than 3.8 million residential customers, will provide the service in 27 states.

In Forsyth County, BellSouth Corp. is the dominant provider of local phone service, but there are more than 20 other companies in the local phone market.

In response to AT&T’s announcement, Clifton Metcalf, a spokesman for BellSouth, said: “I was struck by how much AT&T is admitting that they are depending on government-managed competition. We tend to believe that customer-managed competition is much better.

Government-mandated pricing just doesn’t produce the jobs or services that consumers need or want. But if that’s what they are banking on, I guess it’s a business decision for them. We’re going to continue listening to customers and answering with outstanding value on products and services.”

BellSouth estimates that about 20 percent of its land-line phone service market — residential and business — in North Carolina is now served by other telephone-service providers.

“That doesn’t even count the competition from wireless,” Metcalf said.

In 2002, BellSouth entered the long-distance market in the Southeast, where AT&T is the dominant provider. Through the end of its third quarter ended September 30, 2003, BellSouth had 3.4 million long-distance customers across nine states, including North Carolina.

That’s about 24 percent of the residential market and 34 percent of the mass-market small-business accounts in those states, Metcalf said.

AT&T and BellSouth offer a variety of local and long distance calling plans.

Prices depend on the features customers want.

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(c) 2004, Winston-Salem Journal. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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