On that score, he isn’t alone. In the United Kingdom, the world’s most deregulated telephone market, competition is already part of the local telephone business. More than 100,000 customers now make calls through their cable company, and their ranks should more than double this year. Companies like TeleWest, a joint venture between regional phone company US West and U.S. cable giant Tele-Communications Inc., are using Britain as a testing ground for services they hope to offer in America. (The Washington Post Company, owner of NEWSWEEK, may do so as well.) “It’s a window on the world that’s coming, and not just to the U.S.,” says TeleWest International president Gary Bryson.
Vaill’s new jacks and wire look just as subtle as the old ones did. At a box just down the road, they connect with TeleWest’s fiber-optic cable TV line, which takes Vaill’s calls to a switch run by a longdistance rival of BT. When Vaill calls a noncabled neighbor, two parallel worlds connect as the switch moves the call onto BT’s lines. Voila, free cable, just like the door-to-door salesman promised after Vaill was softened up by leaflets touting clearer lines and faster connections. TeleWest brings the work-at-home accountant big savings: his phone bill has dropped by 20 percent, enough to cover his monthly cable TV fee. Competition has meant other improvements, too. TeleWest bills for each one thousandth of a minute, whereas BT required him to pay for almost a full minute every time he sent a six-second fax across town. Another big TeleWest selling point is itemized billing, still new in Britain. That has paid dividends at Vaill’s house, where his four daughters have been known to keep the line humming. “The postmortems,” he says, newly empowered, “can get bloody.”
Yet competition has meant a few crossed wires. The biggest problem: customers must change their BT phone numbers for TeleWest numbers. Once they do, they may be hard to call. TeleWest doesn’t publish its own phone book, and although the law requires BT to list all phone users in its directory, ex-customer L. Vaill appeared in 1992 as “1. Vaill.” (An accident, says BT.) After a later glitch, callers to BT directory assistance were told Vaill’s number was unlisted. Retailers have even more to lose by changing numbers they’ve spent years marketing. Ford dealer David Dees split his switchboard, using six old BT lines for incoming calls and 12 new TeleWest ones for outgoing. Dees’s only complaint is that when a line fails, he must think twice about who should fix it. “You have to remember, did I call him or did he call me?” he says.
Dees may soon have to think three or four times. Another U S West joint venture comes to his neighborhood in July, offering wireless service priced to compete with BT over short distances and to beat cellular rates by 30 percent over longer ones. A one-minute call a mile away should cost less than 10 cents. “If the price is the same, why wouldn’t you use the phone in your pocket before the phone on your desk?” asks joint-venture leader Andy Sukawaty, who predicts that a quarter of all Americans will rely mainly on such devices within a decade. If he’s right, the innovators will be pocketing something more than phones.
