Another more significant change in Indiana utility business during the past year involves Indiana Bell, the local operating company of "
Baby Bell" Ameritech.
baby bell, BellSouth, seized the lion's share of Venezuela's cellular market when it launched a decade ago.
The Denver-based
Baby Bell also gives free, year-round technology training through its Widening Our World program.
The
Baby Bell local phone companies of the United States face a somewhat different situation, since none of them owns a long-haul network.
MFS Intelenet, a subsidiary of MFS Communications Company, Inc., the largest provider of competitive access telecommunications services in the country, is an alternative to the "
Baby Bell" companies for business customers.
In all, the
Baby Bell serving the middle Atlantic states said it will spend almost $15 billion during 10 years to join its telephone and merger partner TeleCommunications Inc's cable systems to carry voice, video and data.
In 1984, shortly after AT&T's break up, Reid assisted Barnes in moving from the chief financial officer (CFO) post at University of California Press to the finance department of Pacific Telesis (PacTel), a newly hatched
Baby Bell. Within 12 years, Barnes rose to assistant treasurer of PacTel.
Also buying into Williams was SBC Communications, the San Antonio-based
Baby Bell that also owns a 9.82% stake in Telmex, and analysts speculate the two are preparing to forge an alliance to operate in the United States once SBC receives a long-distance license.
Meanwhile, Qwest Communications International made a surprise pounds 34 billion offer to buy "
Baby Bell" US West and Frontier Corporation in a move that would allow it to challenge phone industry leaders AT&T and MCI WorldCom.
But by every antitrust standard of the federal government, Bell Atlantic is either competitive or regulated: Its market structure, still under court discretion, is entirely a creature of the 1984 AT&T divestiture, from which it and its six
Baby Bell sisters were conceived and born.
Inclusion of systems outside Southwestern Bell's five-state region avoids regulatory obstacles and provides the telco with a transmission infrastructure and customer base that may allow it to compete with its
Baby Bell siblings for phone service.
The day after the California earthquake, marketing consultants for the
Baby Bell phone companies rushed out a press release.