New Policy Goes Into Effect Jan. 1 : Faulty Telephone Wiring? It’s Up to You to Fix It
Telephone customers in California will begin receiving notice today that, beginning Jan. 1, they will have to take care of the wiring running from their phones to the outside of their homes and pay to fix it if it breaks.
Traditionally, the phone company has taken care of this “inside” wiring with no direct charge to the customer whose lines required repair work. But the Federal Communications Commission ruled earlier this year that such special costs should no longer be borne by all phone customers.
As with many phone costs, inside-wiring repairs have been “bundled” with many other costs and shared by all customers, said Susan O’Connell, a legal assistant with the FCC. The intent of the new ruling, she said, is to make only the person who needs the work pay the bill for it. (The cost of installing new phone lines in a house or apartment, for example, has been deregulated for several years.)
“Overall,” the FCC order states, “our objectives . . . are to increase competition, to promote new entry into the market, to produce cost savings that would benefit the rate payer, and to create an unregulated competitive marketplace for the development of telecommunications.”
In so ruling, the commission slashed the last remaining state and federal regulations on telephone wires. The order lets anyone install phone wires in homes and small businesses or repair wires in homes and offices.
“You can ask the phone company to do it, someone else can do it, or you can do it yourself--carefully,” O’Connell said.
“This is just the latest round in customer confusion,” said Larry Mobbs, a spokesman for San Francisco-based Pacific Bell. The company’s October bills, which go in the mail today, will explain the change, and further details will accompany November and December bills.
Previous acts causing confusion, Mobbs said, were requirements that customers decide whether to own their phones or to continue leasing them, and to choose a specific long-distance phone service from an array of competing companies. Now, the question will be, in effect, “Who will repair my phone line?”
One early answer to that question is Pacific Bell. The San Francisco-based utility informed its staff late last month that it intends to offer maintenance service itself, for a price, said James McCraney, a deputy division chief at the California Public Utilities Commission. (The PUC is responsible for carrying out the federal government’s latest foray in deregulation.)
Form of Insurance
If the company goes through with this plan, the optional service would resemble a form of repair insurance, and the “premium” would be billed separately from the customer’s regular monthly service charge. Customers not electing such protection would also be able to obtain repairs at the home or office, but for a fee set by the utility.
Whether customers will realize any savings over deregulation of inside wiring is anyone’s guess, O’Connell said. Ever since the 1984 breakup of the Bell system, regulators have been moving toward adoption of what she called “cost-causation.” That means charging individuals for just the services they require, she said.
For example, when the Bell system held a government-granted monopoly on local and long-distance telephone service, profits from toll rates and Yellow Pages advertising were used to keep basic phone service as affordable as possible, as required by federal legislation. With the breakup of that monopoly and the coming of competition for long-distance revenues and publication of phone books, these subsidies no longer exist.
Services Available
The FCC, which had considered its order for more than six years, initially was worried that there might be a scarcity of vendors offering wiring service in the home, especially in rural areas. After hearings, however, it decided that availability was not a problem, O’Connell said.
The only reason nobody but the phone company has offered such services, McCraney said, was that the phone company did it without direct charge. In reality, however, the charge was buried in the company’s overall cost of doing business and thus was paid for by all its customers--those who required special service and those who didn’t.
The PUC is requiring phone companies to replace present fittings that link interior wiring to exterior lines running to telephone poles with a connector that can remotely monitor the line and pinpoint the source of trouble. This is designed to determine who is to pay for the repair--the phone company or the phone customer. How, when and on which customers’ houses these devices are to be placed remain to be decided by the commission.
“There could be upwards of several million field visits necessary . . .,” Pacific Bell observed in a bulletin to its employees last month.
