Shared minutes option planned for wireless, residential calls

SBC Communications, BellSouth and Cingular Wireless have announced the creation of MinuteShare, a new service that will enable residential customers to share a single bucket of minutes for calls made from either their SBC or BellSouth wireline and Cingular wireless phones.

The service will be available in states where both SBC and BellSouth have received long distance authority from the Federal Communications Commission. The plan is not available in Missouri.

With its single, shared bucket of wireline long distance and wireless local and long distance minutes, MinuteShare service, expected to become available later this year, will give customers more flexibility for using their minutes.

"The future is in delivering products that integrate wireline and wireless services in a way that makes them more useful, convenient and valuable for our customers," said Lea Ann Champion, SBC chief marketing officer.

MinuteShare is designed for people who use the large number of night and weekend minutes typically found in wireless plans to make long distance calls from home. With MinuteShare, customers can use the same minutes and use their traditional wireline phones at home. Subscribers who already have unlimited local service from their home phones will continue to have unlimited local calling from their wireline calls, and they also will have the convenience of a single bill and a single customer service contact. Existing customers who have measured local service will continue to have measured local service and not unlimited local service.

A market trial of the MinuteShare program is now under way in Texas with existing customers who had SBC local and domestic long distance service and Cingular wireless service.