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Dialers' New Choice
In an era in which consumers are used to picking television providers, cell phone providers, long-distance providers and Internet service providers, it seems anachronistic that there is still so little choice when it comes to basic local telephone service -- your dial tone. But consumers have had few options since 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell placed his epochal first call. Bell's father-in-law founded the company that eventually became AT&T Corp. It dominated telecommunications until 1984 when a federal judge broke the monopoly up into seven regional Bell companies and AT&T, the long-distance giant. Since that breakup, AT&T has been slowly reconstituting itself like some science fiction creature. The seven regional Bell companies have now consolidated into four, and analysts and industry executives anticipate mergers between local-service companies such as Verizon Communications Inc. and long-distance behemoths such as AT&T.
Do-it-yourself telephone service may still be too much trouble for most consumers, but the Internet-based technology is being adopted by bigger phone companies, including AT&T Corp., which is rolling out a similar service -- CallVantage -- across the nation.
Time Warner Cable and Cablevision Systems Inc. have already begun to roll phone service out in some markets, creating a powerful triple threat for consumers who want to buy their cable television, high-speed Internet and telephone from a single company. Unlike the Internet start-ups and AT&T, the cable companies are offering phone service that looks and feels a lot more like traditional phone service, with installation and maintenance performed by trained technicians.
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