House Calls

Remember when there was only one phone in the house?

Remember when there was only one phone line in the house?

Nowadays in upscale, high-tech Orange County, people are consuming telephone lines and numbers like popcorn at a movie.

Modern houses may be pre-wired for as many as three telephone lines, but some owners find they are having to install more wires. Nowadays when Pacific Bell strings a connection to any house, it uses wire that can handle five lines.

Less than 20 years ago, telephone company planners declared that no more area codes would be needed in the nation for the next 100 years. Now California’s 13 area codes are expected to double by the turn of the century.

Orange County’s 714 area code, created in 1951, has been growing by 650,000 phone numbers a year. It will soon consume its 7.9 million possible telephone numbers, according to Pacific Bell, which plans to impose a second area code on Orange County around January 1998. The number of the area code has not yet been announced.

The pressure for new lines and phone numbers is coming from technology that until recently no one expected to take root in the middle-class home, says Pacific Bell spokesman John Britton.

It works this way, he says.

The family may already have two lines, one for the family and one for the kid. The average number of lines for all households in Orange County now is approaching two, which is high compared with many other regions.

Then Dad or Mom buys a computer and discovers it comes with a modem for connecting via telephone to online services and the Internet. They soon learn that while the modem is connected, it ties up the family phone line, so they install a third line just for the computer.

That’s great, says the kid, for whom the parents long ago bought a computer “to do your homework.” The kid, an Internet veteran, demands a computer line too. That’s four.

Dad’s or Mom’s boss, who is running short of office space, asks whether some of the work can be done at home. It proves convenient, but soon they discover that business calls are tying up the family line. They install one more line for business calls and another line to send and receive business faxes. That’s six.

And after the house down the block is burglarized, they decide to put in a security alarm system, which requires its own phone line. That’s seven.

“Oh, yes,” says PacBell engineering manager Ron Hosoda, “we have households with seven lines.” It’s not all that rare in upscale developments, he says.

The cost of all the lines adds up. Some typical charges: $35 to activate a line; if it’s needed, $123 to install interior wiring; $15 a month for service.

It’s possible of course, to have more phone numbers than you have phone lines.

The kid has a pager; they’ve been popular among teenagers for years. Mom and Dad have a cellular phone between them, and the kid gets one for calling home in emergencies. That’s three more phone numbers consumed--10 phone numbers in all.

This explosion of household communications happened amazingly rapidly--over the past 12 years, in Britton’s estimation.

And while it accelerates, it will change direction very soon, say communications planners. New technology and the new competition among telephone and cable companies are going to make people view personal communications in a different light, they say.

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“Light” is the key word. Both telephone and cable companies are replacing their distribution wires in Orange County with fiber-optic lines--cables of hair-thin, translucent filaments that conduct pulses of light.

These lines can carry communication that simple telephone wires never could--high-definition video images and sound, computer data at speeds 1,000 or more times faster--and carry them simultaneously with voice communications.

PacBell says one fiber-optic filament can carry more telephone traffic than 672 pairs of copper telephone wire. At the same time, the fiber could be delivering 800 channels of cable TV.

Pacific Bell is installing fiber-optic lines in Orange, Villa Park and Cypress and hopes to have them in most of Orange County by 2003.

Cable companies, with smaller networks to convert, are moving faster. Cox Communications, the cable firm that serves Orange County south of Tustin, expects to complete its work by the end of this year.

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Changes in state and federal communications laws have made direct competition between telephone and cable companies possible. Already cable is strung within reach of 97% of all U.S. television households, and about six in 10 already are subscribers.

“Cable is a $25-billion-a-year industry. Telephone is $180 billion,” says Michael Schwartz, a cable industry researcher. “If we can get only 1% of telephone revenues, that’s almost $2 billion. That’s a bunch for us. We don’t need large penetrations.”

According to Schwartz, the cable industry is looking to ally with long-distance telephone companies.

Cox is one of the cable firms in California that has announced it will offer its own telephone service to subscribers. On the other hand, Pacific Bell intends to offer cable-style television channels once its fiber-optic lines are in place.

Whether 10 years from now you are a telephone or a cable subscriber, the little box installed in your home “is going to look, taste and feel the same,” says Bob Barada, vice president of corporate strategy and development for Pacific Telesis Group, parent company of Pacific Bell.

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The typical house in Orange County is connected to both the telephone company and a cable company, says Mark Stucky of Cox Communications. Competition here will be over services, not technology, and the services will make communications even more pervasive than they are now.

“Orange County is going to be a good market for all this,” Barada says. Its affluent residents seem willing to pay the high price of becoming “early adopters” of the latest technologies, he says. Once sales reach the “critical mass,” manufacturing costs will fall, retail prices will plunge and the middle class will jump in with both feet, he says.

Here, according to Pacific Bell and cable industry planners, is what’s in store. Most of it “is on the shelf now or in the labs,” Barada says.

* Home telephones will not need to stay at home. Known tentatively as “tele-go” technology, it will be similar to wireless telephones now common in households, except you will be able to take it out into the neighborhood. Once it’s far enough away from your home, it turns into a sort of cellular phone for use within a few-mile radius.

* A new generation of cellular phones, called PCS for “personal communication system,” will eventually make people think of their phone as attached to them personally, rather than to any particular location.

Turn it on anywhere in North America and you can call or be called. Turn on the pager option and you can be paged. Turn it off and the telephone system will look up the instructions you programmed this morning: Between 9 and 5, forward the call to the office, after 5 to your home, after bedtime to your voice mail.

* All-purpose communicators will be available--a flat screen that hangs on the wall and looks like a picture. Except this picture is animated, showing, say, waves continually breaking on the beach--images fed from a CD-ROM disk playing somewhere else in the house.

But the screen is more than ornamental. For example, the little flashing square in the corner might indicate you’ve received a fax, which you can call up on the screen and read.

The screen responds to your voice commands, although the system is still less than perfect. You tell it “Call Grandma,” and it dials her up for a chat. You tell it to call Stan’s Pizza, and it looks up the number in the electronic phone book, then calls.

You tell it to show your checking balance, and it connects with the bank and displays it. You ask it when “Seinfeld” is on, it tells you and asks whether you want to program that into tonight’s viewing.

You can tell it to download the entire Acme data file from the office while you’re watching the show. And while watching, you can transmit your weekly electrocardiogram to your doctor.

“All of these services will be fairly well accepted,” Barada predicts. If you don’t think so, try to remember when computers seemed alien to the home.

“Now PCs have reached way down into the demography, down to the low income,” he says. “You just can’t do your homework without one nowadays.”