Communications : Pacific Bell Mistake Has a Familiar Ring for Rival

For Dennis E. Love, a Marin County entrepreneur who competes with local phone companies in maintaining telephone wiring and equipment in homes and small businesses, it was a case of deja vu :

When Love opened his new edition of the Pacific Bell phone book on Wednesday, the listing for his company, the Extension Connection, was missing.

Wrong Number Printed

It was missing from the Yellow Pages. It was missing from the White Pages. And an additional, extra-cost Yellow Pages listing was missing too. His name also was missing from the Novato phone book distributed by GTE California, which provides local phone service to the town where Love maintains his home--and the company for which he had such ambitious, nationwide plans just three years ago.

And that’s where the deja vu came in.

Two years ago, when his fledgling enterprise was just getting off the ground, Pacific Bell Directory printed a wrong phone number for the Extension Connection. Love had paid $25,000 for a half-page ad in the Marin County book and a smaller insertion in San Francisco’s.

Pacific Bell Directory is a wholly owned subsidiary of Pacific Bell, itself a unit of San Francisco-based Pacific Telesis Group.

As a result of that error, Love maintained, the Extension Connection’s sales plunged as potential customers found it difficult, if not impossible, to reach his company. Eventually the two sides reached a settlement under which Pacific Bell stopped billing for the botched ad and ran a free corrected advertisement in last year’s directories.

“We were just coming out of the effects from the last time,” Love said Wednesday. “We were just starting to get our (revenue) numbers turned around. Now this new directory is out and we’re going down the sewer again.

“There’s nothing I can do,” he complained. “They control it all.”

‘One of Those Ironies’

Nancy Swasey, a spokeswoman for Pacific Bell Directory, confirmed having received Love’s complaint and said the incident is “under investigation.” Pacific Bell spokeswoman Anne Beaufort attributed any omissions to “human error.”

“It was not that we were doing anything purposeful against Dennis Love,” Beaufort said. “He’s the last person we’d want something like this to happen to (because of the previous incident). It’s just one of those ironies.”

The Federal Communications Commission in 1986 ruled that telephone wires inside customers’ premises--whether homes or small businesses--are the property and responsibility not of local phone companies but of property owners. The declared intent of the FCC order was to open up maintenance of inside wiring--formerly a phone company monopoly--to outside competitors, effective Jan. 1, 1987.

At the time Love, with a fleet of three trucks and nine employees, gushed with enthusiasm: “Come January, this industry is born!” he told The Times in October, 1986. “I think we’ll see a real revolution in the phone industry because of this discussion.”

Love expected to franchise his operation across the country from his Marin County headquarters, and he even took the Extension Connection public, its shares trading over the counter as TWAR (for “Telephone Wars,” he said). The latest directory snafu stunned the company’s largest shareholder, Unisource Equities, a San Diego management-consulting firm that agreed with Love’s original optimistic outlook, Unisource consultant Don Gray said.

“It’s quite shocking,” Gray said. “This is certainly more than coincidence.”

Gray added details to Pacific Bell’s settlement over the earlier ad, which under one of the terms was made secret though communicated to Unisource as a TWAR’s shareholder. Gray said Pacific Bell not only ceased billing Extension Connection for the botched ad and ran the corrected ad free in its next edition, but also paid “about $200,000 in cash.”

‘Largest Settlement Ever’

“Bell said it was the largest settlement ever given for a wrong number in the Yellow Pages,” Gray said.

In accepting the settlement, Extension Connection also promised not to sue Pacific Bell on antitrust grounds, Gray said. “I believe that this will certainly color any court’s mind that any agreement he signed not to sue them on antitrust grounds is no longer valid,” he commented.

That’s a subject of current interest to the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee, which has called a special hearing Monday in Sacramento to explore telephone service and the state of regulation in California. Love said he intends to testify.

“Everything that we do is left to the mercy of the people we compete against--the phone company,” he said. “This is not just an isolated incident.”