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             California Public Utilities Commission
505 Van Ness Avenue, Room 5301            San Francisco, CA 94102
CONTACT: Armando Rendon           April 10, 1996         CPUC-011
         415-703-1366                                (R95-04-043)

     CPUC SAYS CONSUMERS WON'T HAVE TO CHANGE PHONE NUMBERS
            IF THEY GO WITH LOCAL SERVICE COMPETITOR

     The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) today
ordered that local service customers must be able to retain their
existing numbers even if they change to a rival provider.  Former
monopoly phone companies and the new Competitive Local Carriers
must offer each other, in industry lingo,  "interim number
portability."
     Pacific Bell (Pacific) and GTE California (GTEC) must
promptly file a statement with the CPUC detailing prices and
terms for offering portability at a wholesale rate.
     Without portability in place, a consumer might be reluctant
to change carriers and be forced to forfeit an existing number
for a new one with a competitor provider, even if a competitor
could offer a lower rate.  A customer could incur costs for
reprinting stationary or just prefer to keep a familiar number.
"This impediment," the Commission said, "would be an unacceptable
constraint on the development of a competitive market."
     Portability will be carried out for an interim period
through the use of remote call forwarding (RCF) and direct inward
dialing (DID).
     For the time being, everyone who changes to another local
service provider will be on remote call forwarding.  This will
limit certain services such as Caller ID--a call that's forwarded
would show the previous home number of the RCF customer and not
the number of the person making the call.  DID, intended
primarily for businesses, allows incoming calls to be dialed
directly to phone stations served by PBX or a CENTREX; the call
need not go through an operator.
     Pacific and GTEC will provide RCF for the time being at a
wholesale monthly rate: $1.94 and $2.29, respectively.  These are
interim rates and may be adjusted based on results of a cost
                             -more-
study being conducted in the Open Access and Network
Architecture Development proceeding, which is looking at several
pricing and cost aspects of local phone competition.
     The measures adopted today are considered temporary until a
permanent system is developed which does not require two
telephone numbers, the original number and the forwarded number.
The California Local Number Portability Task Force, set up by the
CPUC last May, submitted a report February 29 offering for review
five ways of enabling customers to change phone companies without
losing their existing phone numbers.
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