Phone fight: The local phone wars are...

Phone fight: The local phone wars are escalating, but it’s not the battle that telecommunications reformers and consumers were expecting.

More than a year after landmark federal legislation opened the local phone business to competition, some of biggest names in telecommunications--AT&T;, MCI, Sprint and Pacific Bell--seem to be spending more time fighting one another in regulatory hearings than they are fighting for new customers.

A key element of the three big long-distance companies’ strategy for offering dial tones in California is to buy phone service in bulk from incumbents Pac Bell and GTE of California. They can then resell it to their customers with their own brand names. But the complex interconnection agreements they must negotiate with one another have resulted in numerous complaints to state regulators.

The latest salvo came last week, when Sprint accused Pac Bell of deliberately dragging its feet in converting customers to Sprint’s local phone service.

In a 32-page filing with the California Public Utilities Commission, Sprint alleged that the Baby Bell has repeatedly failed to speed up processing of customer orders for its new service, which so far is available only in San Diego and Santa Barbara. On a typical day, the backlog of orders is between 150 and 200, according to the complaint.

Moreover, Sprint says a significant number of the completed orders it received from Pac Bell contained errors--9% in a five-day period earlier this month, for example, said Steve Dykes, a spokesman for the long-distance company.

Sprint wants the PUC to order Pac Bell to eliminate the backlog and reduce errors.

Those accusations echo complaints made by MCI and AT&T; last year.

In November, MCI said Pacific Bell representatives incorrectly told customers that MCI was not yet able to offer local service in California, that MCI local customers also had to use MCI’s long-distance service and that MCI was less reliable than Pac Bell.

Pacific Bell vehemently denies those accusations. On the Sprint matter, Lee Bauman, vice president for local competition, blamed Sprint for most of the problems, saying that the error rate on orders submitted by the long-distance carrier reached into the double digits.

But Bauman said the real reason AT&T;, MCI and Sprint have filed complaints is to delay Pac Bell’s entry into the lucrative long-distance market.

On Friday, the PUC ordered AT&T;, MCI and Pac Bell to meet March 4 to try to negotiate a solution to their problems. If that fails, hearings and testimony are tentatively scheduled for mid-May, and a resolution could be delayed until late summer or early fall, said Kyle DeVine, a spokeswoman for the commission.