PACIFIC BELL WILL REDUCE RATES; CUTS ORDERED BY REGULATORS.Byline: Gregory J. Wilcox and Ben Sullivan Daily News Staff Writers State regulators ordered Pacific Bell on Thursday to slash its rates for products like toll calls and custom calling services by $305 million annually, a reduction that could save customers up to $35 monthly. Residential and business customers of the telecommunications giant should start seeing the savings in the next several months, said the California Public Utilities Commission The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC; also often commonly referred to as simply the PUC) [1] is a state Public Utilities Commission which regulates privately-owned utilities in the state of California, including electric power, . About $242 million of the reductions will go toward lowering local residential and business toll services - calls farther than 12 miles - and special services like call forwarding call forwarding n. A telephone service that enables a customer to have an incoming call automatically rerouted to another extension. Noun 1. . The balance will lower the rates long-distance companies like AT&T and MCI (1) (Media Control Interface) A high-level programming interface from Microsoft and IBM for controlling multimedia devices. It provides commands and functions to open, play and close the device. (2) (Microwave Communications Inc. pay Pac Bell for access to their phone lines. The savings will depend on usage. Residential customers who do not make a lot of toll calls could save a few cents to a few dollars per month, Pacific Bell said. Those making a lot of calls could save up to $35 per month. Small businesses will benefit more than larger ones under the new rate structure, with the savings ranging from $9 to $20 per month, the company said. ``These lower rates immediately make our prices highly competitive,'' Jim Callaway, the company's president of public affairs Those public information, command information, and community relations activities directed toward both the external and internal publics with interest in the Department of Defense. Also called PA. See also command information; community relations; public information. , said in a statement. Thursday's ruling is the final element of a plan the CPUC CPUC California Public Utilities Commission CPUC Current Procurement Unit Cost adopted in October 1996 that deals with the issue of how phone companies would recover the expense of providing service to high-cost rural areas. Previously, high-volume urban users - residential and business customers - had subsidized phone service for low-volume rural users, said Bob Lane, an adviser to PUC (Public Utility Commission) A regulatory body in every state in the U.S. that governs public utilities within its jurisdiction such as electricity, gas, oil, sewer, water, transportation and telephone service. Some states call it the Public Service Commission (PSC). Commissioner Jessie Knight Jr. So the commission decided that all users of telecommunications services would pay about 4 percent of their total bill in a high-cost fund that local phone companies could draw from, but rates were not changed. Thursday's decision returns extra money to consumers that went into that fund. Paul Stein, an attorney for the consumer advocacy group Toward Utility Rate Normalization In relational database management, a process that breaks down data into record groups for efficient processing. There are six stages. By the third stage (third normal form), data are identified only by the key field in their record. , said Thursday's decision is good because it benefits a majority of Pac Bell customers. Pacific Bell, a subsidiary of SBC (1) (SBC Communications Inc., San Antonio, TX, www.sbc.com) A large, national telecommunications company that grew from a multitude of local and regional companies, including Southwestern Bell, Pacific Bell and Nevada Bell, into a single, unified brand by 2002. Communications Inc., is the largest provider of local telephone service in California, with 13.1 million customers. |
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