The following statement can be attributed to David M. Eisenberg, Vice President for State External Affairs:

Bell Atlantic has once again prematurely claimed victory. Rather than telling the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) that the state's local market is "irreversibly open", Bell Atlantic should allow the PSC to review the application themselves and wait for the PSC to study the final results of the KPMG Peat Marwick tests of its operational support systems. The final results of that study have not yet been released, but the interim results from KPMG show that there is much more work to be done.

Emerging new entrants to the Bell Atlantic market are still having problems today:

• getting new orders placed in a timely manner
• transferring local Bell Atlantic customers to their lines, indicating significant problems with Bell Atlantic's operational support systems
• getting Bell Atlantic to address maintenance, repair and billing problems in a timely manner, ultimately leaving their new customer believing that their service is inferior to Bell Atlantic's service.

While Bell Atlantic has made some progress, it is unclear that they have fully satisfied any of the 14-points of the Telecom Act checklist, let alone all of them. And until Bell Atlantic's operational support systems are 100% operationally functional, it is clear that several of the 14-point checklist items will not have been satisfied.

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April 14, 1999

Contact:

Eileen Doherty, Sprint, (O) 202-828-7423 E-mail: eileen.b.doherty@mail.sprint.com