High-Tech Services May Be a Call Away

In Pittsburgh, parents can call the “homework hot line” and check up on their children’s daily assignments. Oklahoma City phone users can leave recorded messages when they get a busy signal--for a $1.50 charge. And next year, Pacific Bell customers in the Southland will be able to dial up the latest headlines and sports scores.

Those are just some of the high-tech services that local phone companies are beginning to provide in the wake of court decisions last year allowing them expanded entry into the information business.

On Wednesday, for example, NYNEX--the parent company of New England Telephone and New York Telephone--announced that it would make available an electronic yellow pages service to customers with personal computers. The service will cost 61 cents a minute and give callers detailed information about businesses listed in the directory.

Only the day before, Pacific Bell unveiled a plan to begin offering customized news reports such as stock quotes and sports scores, along with other new services, to voice-mail customers.

Pacific Bell is also planning an “expanded directory assistance,” which would provide callers to 411 such basic information as the address and hours of a business as well as its telephone number. Later this year, the firm says it will also begin testing the “Knowledge Gateway Network,” which will give California schools a telecommunications link to the National Science Foundation’s database network.

Although most of these new services are still in the research and test phase--and years away from widespread use--they nonetheless are being closely watched by the country’s big newspaper companies, which are seeking to restrict telephone companies’ entry into the information market.

The newspaper companies fear that selling everything from stock quotes to classified advertisements over phone lines eventually will cut into their profits. At stake are billions of dollars in potential revenue, even as both industries face slow growth in their traditional core businesses.

On Wednesday, the battle over those future profits went to Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are weighing several bills that would regulate how far the local telephone companies can go in providing information services.

Ivan Seidenberg, vice chairman of NYNEX, said the seven regional Bell companies should be able to continue expanding into information services--as well as enter the phone equipment manufacturing and long-distance businesses, from which they have been barred since the breakup of the Bell System.

“We cannot hope to compete in the global telecommunication market of the year 2000 and beyond while living in a regulatory environment suited for 1982,” he said.

But David Easterly, president of the Cox Newspaper chain, and AT&T; Chief Executive Robert Allen countered that the phone companies would use their position as local monopolies to subsidize other new businesses.

In many instances, however, the phone companies are not waiting for Congress to pass new laws that might set restrictions on their new information services.

For example, Bell Atlantic customers in Pittsburgh and Anne Arundel County, Md., can call a “Message Board” to find out what homework assignments have been handed out to students, or to listen for other school announcements.

Although seemingly simple in practice, the Bell companies nonetheless have not been allowed until recently to provide such services, known as storing and forwarding.

The services--whether as simple as electronic mail or as complicated as database retrieval--were only available through independent providers such as Prodigy, a computer database network. The phone companies say the cost of such services is generally out of reach of the average household.