A new era in telecommunications.

• Author: Holloway, Constance
• Position: North Carolina cellular telephone service providers

Now that cable television, local phone-service providers and long-distance companies can invade each others' turf, competition for customers is expected to send prices tumbling.

"The savings will be significant," says Anthony M. Copeland, vice president and general counsel of BTI Telecommunications Services in Raleigh. "And the competition will be fierce."

The ensuing battle of the providers will expand customers' options and also accelerate the speed and ease with which voice, video and data flow. In other words, talk is not only supposed to get cheap. It will also get better and faster.

Much is at stake for providers. In North Carolina, Atlanta-based BellSouth is the dominant local-service provider, with 52% of the market. Sprint Carolina Telephone has 25%, GTE South has 7%, and Sprint Centel has 6%. Local telephone service is worth $100 billion a year nationwide and $1. I billion in North Carolina.

No wonder AT&T Corp., MCI Communications and cable provider Time Warner Inc. want their shot at wooing local customers. And the seven regional Baby Bells are waiting in the wings to offer long-distance services.

"In a few years, the distinction between local and long distance will be mostly gone," says David Arneke, AT&T's public-relations manager in North Carolina.

"The changes that we have seen are really going to be insignificant compared to those we'll see in the next five or 10 years," BellSouth spokesman Clifton Metcalf says.

Customers will see a host of new services and products. Some already are available, and more will proliferate as the telecommunications market makes room for new providers. "Customers won't see any difference between providers of entertainment, information services and communications," Arneke predicts.

The Next Generation of Technology

Want a cellular phone but not a contract? How about lower usage fees? BellSouth says you can have it all, plus some major extras. The company, through BellSouth Personal Communications, is constructing a new digital personal-communications system, which it plans to introduce to North Carolina by midsummer. The beauty of the system is that BellSouth and its partners will provide one-stop shopping for a wide array of technological services. And all these services can be tapped from a new generation of portable telephones.

For starters, the system offers short messaging capabilities similar to those available from sophisticated two-way pagers. The system also has caller ID and voice mail. Worried about security? All calls will be encrypted. And the portable phone can be plugged into a PC so the customer can get on-line anywhere in the service area.

Businesses also will be able to connect with other divisions via the system's abbreviated-dialing feature. Callers can use as few as two digits to reach other employees on the system. "We believe that this is the next generation of technology," says John Hoffman, general manager of BellSouth Personal Communications.

It all centers on what Hoffman calls a "dumb phone," a simple, portable unit with a liquid-crystal display. It gets its smarts from the Subscriber Identity Module card, a small microprocessor. Users can insert the card into the phone and, after a series of keypad' commands, activate the service through BellSouth.

The phone will be sold through national retailers. BellSouth hasn't settled on pricing, Hoffman says, but the cost of the phone models will likely be between $100 and $250. The company expects use...