Thanks to its roots as a local telephone company, Sprint has about 8m access lines.
Cable is cheaper and faster than phone lines, and more cable companies will also offer local telephone service.
And Internet messages travel round the world for no more than the price of a local telephone call.
NTT'S answer is to pay for forays abroad by exploiting its remaining near-monopoly in local telephone traffic in Japan.
Andaz has made its pricing both transparent and all-inclusive: breakfast, Internet, mini bar, local telephone calls, laundry and unlimited movies.
That, in turns converts the data back into voice and sends the call down local telephone lines to the recipient in Singapore.
It forthrightly refused to recognize that the Internet was obliterating traditional barriers between long-distance and local telephone calls and between telephony, TV, radio and cable.
The local telephone monopoly will also be facing competition before long.
Svyazinvest's bosses will therefore have power over almost all of Russia's communications system (in many regions, the local telephone firms also hold the first cellular-telephone licences).
Last year, it established a direct-sales network in Germany allowing investors who are enticed by its advertisements to dial a local telephone number to purchase funds.
If CapRock can grab just 5% of the local telephone and data market in the region it has targeted, says Thompson, it will have a billion-dollar business.
Furthermore, stays at AKA include bicycle usage, local telephone calls, private parking, on-site laundry, business centre services and use of the executive boardroom, all of which are complimentary.
But New York-based Verizion, the nation's largest local telephone company, must still separate its retail and wholesale operations into distinct units, each with its own accounting and customer service operations.
Michigan Bell Telephone, the Court unanimously upheld an FCC regulation requiring providers of local telephone services to make the entrance facilities of their telecom networks available to competitors at cost-based rates.
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Svyazinvest was originally conceived both as a holding company for the state's interests in 86 local telephone firms across Russia and as a competitor for Rostelecom, a state-run near-monopoly in long-distance and international telephony.
Until a year ago, most European web surfers had to pay twice for their internet access - a fee to their ISP and the cost of a local telephone call each time they logged on.
Nobody would claim that the 1996 act has worked as intended, but it is possible that real competition in local telephone markets is nearer than some have thought--one reason why so many telecoms stocks fell after the deal.
Citing a deepening financial crisis in telecommunications, U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell proposed that local telephone companies--the "Baby Bells, " such as SBC and Verizon--be allowed to bid for the remnants of WorldCom, whose major remaining asset is long-distance carrier MCI.
It offers 56 megabits per second over a 30-mile radius. (The current standard is 11 megabits per second over a half-mile.) Wi-Max antennas on roofs and water towers will spring up like crazy and may begin to threaten the cable and local telephone empires.
EarthLink will lease the old copper telephone wires connecting homes to their local telephone company, converting calls into packets of data at that point before sending them over telecommunications wholesaler Covad 's (otc: COVD - news - people ) national data network.
In Singapore, consumers have historically had to pay up to .085 cents a minute for local telephone calls - Starhub gets a cut of that revenue for every minute its customers spend connected to the Web, since they must get there by placing a local call.
So Nynex, hardly the most popular local telephone company in America, knew it was in for a scrap when it recently unveiled a plan to deprive some Manhattanites of their treasured 212 area code--arguably the only local telephone code that is recognised from Tokyo to Tomsk.
But even at three miles (5km) from the local telephone exchange, the speed of his broadband connection has inched up over the past few years from 65 kilobytes a second to more than 90 kilobytes a second as the local line has been tweaked and legacy equipment like echo-cancelling coils removed from its junction boxes.
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Two of America's biggest local-telephone companies are to merge, which will reduce the number of Baby Bells , originally seven, to four.
MCI's brand, marketing and billing systems with its burgeoning local-telephone operations, it might be able to take a big slice of business away from the Baby Bells.
Soon after Qwest Communications, the biggest local-telephone company in 14 states, joined the list of firms under investigation, it was revealed that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is looking into the sales practices of Bristol-Myers Squibb, a big drug company.
Best of all, WorldCom has local fibre-optic telephone networks in 86 American cities.
Powell speculates that old-school telephone companies and local TV broadcasters have a limited future, if any.
Customers seeking further information can go online, call into their local Ulster Bank branch or telephone 0800 231232.
Likewise, traditional local and long-distance telephone service over the copper network is being displaced by better technology from cable and fiber.
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