Dial-Tone Deals.

• Author: KRONEMYER, BOB

Indiana businesses getting choices.

Picking who's going to provide local dial-tone service is no longer a far-off concept. For Indiana businesses, who's providing local phone service is now a multiple-choice question, with so many choices that it's easy to become frustrated.

So how does one go about choosing something so crucial as a dial-tone provider? It's important to identify the company that can best "provide exactly the desired products and services quickly, efficiently and at a fair price," states Bill Kula, a director of operations at GTE Corp.

GTE is what telecommunications regulators call an incumbent dial-tone provider, one of the companies that has been providing local phone service for years. With 1.1 million customer access lines in Indiana GTE offers both local and long-distance service. "We're also an Internet service provider, so we offer dial-up Internet access through gte.net," Kula says. Customers can log on at 28.8 to 56 kbps, and even at higher speeds in certain geographic areas. "We're one of the top 10 Internet service providers in the country," he notes, with more than 500,000 Internet access customers around the country.

Why is that important? Because telecom providers are striving these days to pull together into one package services that have been fragmented, split among a number of different companies. Since the breakup of AT&T, Americans have become accustomed to buying local and long-distance service separately, and more recent services like voice mail, wireless services and Internet connections often add more monthly checks to write. Now, communications providers hope to bring all of these services (perhaps even more) back together again into one bundle.

"It helps to contract an organization that has the scale and scope to be able to develop new products and services that are on the cutting-edge and that take a business customer's needs into consideration," Kula explains. "As a business grows from a few employees to several 100, the phone company should be there every step of the way to provide recommendations and counsel, as well as the actual services."

GTE services range from advanced data to on-line yellow pages. The company also operates a number of "technology solution" centers, including one in Fort Wayne. "We invite customers to visit one of our centers in order to help them define their needs and match GTE applications," Kula says. "It is almost the equivalent of having a customer come to a...