Word: belled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...independent companies control the rest: 26.8 million phones in all states except Delaware and Rhode Island. Together, AT&T and the independents make up the U.S. "telephone establishment." In recent years the courts and the Federal Communications Commission have allowed newer competitors into a field that Ma Bell and friends would love to call their...
...surface in Congress. Exploratory House hearings will begin on a bill that would effectively abolish newer forms of communications competition. Officially, the bill is called the Consumer Communications Reform Act. But because it seems so heavily weighted in favor of the telephone establishment, critics refer to it as the "Bell Bill" or, worse, the "Monopoly Protection...
...passed by Congress in its present form, the bill would squelch several annoying bits of static on the phone companies' line. One of them: the so-called specialized common carriers-non-Bell communications companies that grew out of a 1959 FCC decision opening a new spectrum of microwave channels to private business. Currently, there are three such carriers in operation-the biggest is MCI Telecommunications Corp., based in Washington, D.C.-that run microwave transmission facilities for Government and business clients in competition with AT&T. The bill, by ruling out "wasteful or unnecessary duplication of communications lines," would apparently...
Competition would also be lessened for Ma Bell's Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary-currently the target of a massive Government divestiture suit (TIME, Dec. 2, 1974). The bill might knock out some of the 400 independent telephone-equipment suppliers that have sprung up in the past eight years since the FCC first allowed non-Bell gadgetry, from entire corporate phone systems to replicas of antique French telephones, to be plugged into AT&T lines...
...growing market: Wall Street, where stock traders can reach one another at a touch of a button, using consoles made by non-Bell companies. Present regulations require approval of these devices by the FCC. That is not a major burden even to small manufacturers, but the new bill would take the FCC out of the picture and require equipment approval by utility regulators in all 50 states. Ma Bell is well prepared for these laborious procedures; the smaller companies...