Phone Merger Fallout Won’t Be Immediate

The planned merger of Bell Atlantic Corp. and Nynex Corp., like the previously announced combination of SBC Communications Inc. and Pacific Telesis Group, is huge and important but won’t have an immediate effect on everyday phone users.

Even if the deals take months to finish, they won’t change the fact that most people have just one choice for local phone service--their existing Baby Bell carrier.

Once the deals are done, the first big change for customers in the Pacific Telesis and Nynex regions will be that their phone company will have a new name. PacTel will become SBC and Nynex will become Bell Atlantic.

Businesses will get new service pricing and options quickly, analysts said, because they provide the most profit to the phone companies and are the target of the most competition.

Bell Atlantic and Nynex serve contiguous regions along the Atlantic Coast and their merger presents a chance to eliminate several inefficient divisions in phone operations of their business customers, which are acute between New York City and New Jersey.

“The fit is most natural from a geographical standpoint,” said Mark Lowenstein, analyst at Yankee Group in Boston.

Consumers will see new services and pricing from the combined companies later, said Joseph Kraemer, who leads the communications and electronics practice at the management consulting firm A.T. Kearney.

“If you go out two years, maybe even late 1997, then most likely from a consumer point of view, you start to see things like offers of long-distance, particularly for calls that conclude anywhere in the combined area,” Kraemer said.

Bell Atlantic and Nynex have already combined their cellular operations, providing an avenue for combining rates and services to consumers.

But the biggest difference will be when Bell Atlantic-Nynex and SBC-PacTel start to provide national or international long-distance service. Both are likely to align or merge with existing long-distance carriers in the next year or two.

Executives at SBC, which has a stake in Mexico’s largest telephone company, have already spoken about the common interest their Texas and California customers have in Mexico.

Bell Atlantic is much more likely to look east, making deals with European carriers for transatlantic service, analysts said.