READY, WILLING, CABLE

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Greetings, dear telephone customer! are you bewildered by all the marketing pitches for long-distance service that AT&T, MCI and Sprint have been hurling at you? Well, you ain't seen nothing yet. Consider what's come until now as basic training for the blitzkrieg of packages and special offers that will arrive once Congress moves to deregulate local telephone service and cable-TV and let eager new competitors charge into that field, bringing business rivalries, price wars, heated local politics and...yes, of course, TV linkups over phone lines and phone calls via cable. "Things will go insane in terms of all the different features and pricing packages," predicts David Goodtree, who follows the industry for Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It will drive consumers nuts."

The coming profusion of consumer choice, confusing as it may be, is just what lawmakers have in mind. Their aim is to open up competition in the $400 billion telecommunications industry, dismantling 61 years of regulations that have walled off TV and telephone companies into separate industries. Unshackling the market, advocates of reform argue, will benefit business and, in the long run, provide bargains for consumers. The House is expected to take up its version of a reform bill by the time Congress recesses at the end of next week, if not sooner. A companion measure passed the Senate last month 81 to 18.

The very scope of the legislation has brought forth armies of lobbyists to advance the interests of clients ranging from the seven Baby Bell phone companies to cable- TV behemoths like Time Warner and Tele Communications Inc. (TCI). This onslaught of special interests has led consumer advocates and other experts to warn that what began as a laudable attempt to promote competition could wind up benefitting media giants far more than their customers. "The people screwed are the consumers," declares Gary Arlen, a telecommunications consultant in Bethesda, Maryland. "Cable rates will rise in the short term before there's rate relief from competition." Massachusetts Representative Ed Markey, the ranking Democrat on the House Telecommunications Subcommittee concurs: "Consumers will wind up tipped upside down, with money shaken out of their pockets to subsidize the deregulatory dreams of the largest monopolies in the country. The fiber-optic barons are in control."

Sponsors of the legislation brush aside such arguments. "The new environment is going to be consumer driven," asserts Texas Republican Jack Fields, who chairs the House telecommunications panel. "If [cable-TV and phone services] are not attractive, then consumers are not going to participate in your enterprise."

While the House and Senate bills differ in some particulars, their main objectives are largely the same. Like the Senate, the House would:

-- Let cable-TV and local phone companies enter one another's business. Other firms, including long-distance carriers, could also provide local phone service. Result: one-stop shopping in which companies would offer packages of telephone and TV services directly to the home. With that in mind, cable firms TCI, Cox Enterprises and Comcast last year joined forces with Sprint to develop a nationwide network for delivering cable and telephone signals to the same customers.