Caller ID Phone Service in California

Your May 28 editorial (“FCC Dials a Wrong Number”) about Caller ID service shows that The Times has been hoodwinked by a disgruntled and ax-grinding California Public Utilities Commission.

First, there are two issues--delivery of calling party number (CPN) and the Caller ID (CID) service itself. Because of infighting within the industry and 50 different state jurisdictions, the Federal Communications Commission decided to get this late-20th-century telephone technology serving the nation in a seamless manner.

There are many of us who are informed consumers, who are not telemarketers and who want to avail ourselves of this advance in technology--an electronic “peephole” on our telephone pathway to our private homes.

I want to know who is calling me. If it’s blocked, I’ll assume it’s one of those pesky telemarketers, thus I’ll use my CID equipment to reject the call (the caller gets to pay to hear that I’m rejecting blocked calls). By the same token, I won’t block when calling my friends, but I will block when calling government or large business organizations.

The PUC is in a tiff because the FCC saw it differently than the myopic state commission. Instead of trying to change the rest of the country, the PUC would have served the public far better by having had Pacific Bell and GTE spend some $30 million of the ratepayers’ money in truly informing us about both the benefits and perils of CID.

My private residence number is listed with my name, but no address. Further, if you are a friend or other social contact of mine, I likely already have your number. Your sending your number to my home before I answer the phone seems to me like the courteous thing to do, since the technology now exists to do just that.

WALLACE B. ROBERTS

San Clemente

* Your commendable editorial overlooks an especially bothersome aspect of the Caller ID muddle: Blocking cannot be applied to calls to 800 or 900 numbers. This is a serious invasion of privacy. Operators of many of those numbers are the very ones most likely to abuse the information a telephone number may reveal.

The PUC tells me that federal law mandates this extraordinary situation, and that only an act of Congress can change it. I fear we are doomed to remain grist for the mills of commerce, politics and other special interests that constantly intrude in one’s home with unwanted solicitations and huck- stering.

IRWIN ROSTEN

Los Angeles