L.A. County Switches to Cut Its Phone Bill

Los Angeles County has chosen MCI and Western Union as its primary long-distance telephone carriers, shifting service from AT&T; Communications.

The county’s Facilities Management Department estimated that the change would save the county’s 54 departments up to $250,000 a year on their total $38-million telecommunications bill. (That figure includes equipment and maintenance as well as the cost of calls.)

Wayne R. Bunnell, the department’s deputy director, said the county selected Western Union and MCI from among a dozen bidders for the county’s toll telephone business. The county analyzed its toll calling patterns, then requested quotes from interested carriers on their rates for handling a period of typical calls.

“It was a simple matter of mathematics and economics at the end,” he said.

The county, which has agencies scattered from Lancaster to Long Beach and from Pomona to Malibu, installed its own “tandem network” in 1984 to handle its complex internal telephone traffic, Bunnell said. The network routes calls to a central county-owned switch that relays them by the county’s microwave system, avoiding toll charges.

The tandem network will also route long-distance calls over either Western Union’s system or MCI’s, depending on which route is less costly. The user will not be aware of which network is carrying a long-distance call, Bunnell said. By dialing 1 and an area code, followed by a local number, a call will be routed at the tandem network switch, which decides which service will handle the call from there.

“We’ll still be looking at this pretty close,” Bunnell said.

The new system will be phased in as Pacific Bell and General Telephone convert their local network switches to so-called equal-access service. The former Bell System phone companies are required, under the agreement that made them independent of AT&T;, to offer equal ease of access and equal quality of connections to all long-distance carriers. Under equal access, callers can use any kind of telephone--push-button or dial--and designate any competing long-distance carrier as their primary service.

Until the local switches serving the county’s 35,000 lines are fully converted to equal-access service--over the next few months--dialing 1 will continue to route calls automatically over AT&T;’s long-distance network. To obtain an alternative carrier now requires using a push-button phone and punching additional digits to identify the carrier and the caller’s account.