Bell Official Urges End to Restrictions on Its Business

Congress should lift restrictions preventing the seven regional Bell telephone companies from making telecommunications equipment and providing information services, the chairman of Ameritech said Thursday.

“No other single initiative could do more to get this country’s telecommunications policy back on track,” said William L. Weiss, head of the Chicago-based Bell company whose subsidiary phone companies serve Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.

At a Washington news conference, Weiss said business restrictions placed on the Bell companies five years ago as part of the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. divestiture are not serving the public interest. He called it unfair to prohibit the companies from making their own equipment, contending their removal from the marketplace through the breakup of AT&T; has resulted in dominance by foreign manufacturers and a $2.6-billion trade deficit for telecommunications equipment at the end of 1987.

Weiss said he would urge House members to pass a resolution introduced by Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) to lift the manufacturing ban and to allow the regional companies to sell information services such as financial planning, spreadsheet analyses and electronic directories provided for computers.

U.S. District Judge Harold Greene earlier this year modified the AT&T; consent decree to allow the Bell companies to transmit information services, but he refused to permit them to originate the information themselves. He said the Bell companies’ control of local phone networks would give them an unfair advantage over information-services competitors.