The Central Coast has a new choice for phone service.

This week, Blue Casa Communications started running advertisements and offering home telephone service that includes local, long distance and international calling combined with a variety of calling options, said Don Oas, chief executive officer and founder of Blue Casa.

In competition with Verizon Communications, the new company is initially seeking customers along the coast between Oxnard and San Luis Obispo. Its plans include one that would be attractive for those making frequent calls to Mexico, Oas said.

"Until now, one company (Verizon) held a monopoly on local phone service on the Central Coast . . . (while there has been) local phone service competition for two years in other areas" of the country, he said.

"Verizon does certain things very well; (they have) a great network. They are very solid in the operation of that network. But we provide better packages and better service," Oas claimed. "The customer chooses who they will do business with."

"There is sufficient room for competition in telecommunications today," Verizon spokesman Bill Kula said. "We have invested heavily in upgrading our network.

"The customer has a great choice in selecting their provider of various forms of communication-long distance, wireless, high speed internet.

"Because of our size, we are able to bundle together many services for the customer and place them on a single bill," Kula said.

Verizon is the second largest provider-after SBC-of local phone service in California and the largest wireline and wireless provider in the United States, with SBC second, Kula said. The company has more than 3.7 million customer access lines in California-with almost all of them in Southern California.

A Blue Casa customer would keep his phone number and use Verizon's infrastructure, Oas said.

The federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowed the Baby Bell telephone companies back into the long-distance market and "let new entrants (like Blue Casa) come in and offer local phone service," Oas said. The new entrants "purchase wholesale capabilities of the local carrier, package it and resell it to the customers."

The situation is comparable to one or two years ago when AT&T was required to sell long-distance time to new competitors such as MCI and Sprint, who then resold the time to customers, Oas said.

In areas of the country where local phone service competition has been offered for up to two years, "20 to 25 percent of the customers have moved to the new entrants," he said. "There will be others (offering local phone service) coming into the area."

Blue Casa's selling point is one bill for a simplified bundle of local and long-distance service combined with various features such as three-way calling, call waiting and caller ID combined with "good prices and service," Oas said. "The customer will get the same representative each time they call, and everything is bilingual."

"The trend today is to bundle several services . . . with a discount, said Kula at Verizon. "Our packages are selling well. The customers are pleased. Even with added competition, the customers will find great value in the packages we are offering."

A former head of consumer products for Verizon, Oas has "seen what works and what doesn't in home telephone service from both a customer perspective and the operations perspective," he said.

"Phone service is in fact quite complicated, however we don't believe customers want or need to share an appreciation of this. They only care about great service at great prices."