Bill Would Ease Ban on Local Phone-TV Ties : Cable: Combined services would have to share their networks. GTE, meanwhile, seeks to save its Cerritos venture.

WASHINGTON —  House lawmakers introduced a bill Monday that would allow local phone companies into the cable TV business in their own back yards, but would require them to grant cable competitors equal access to their networks.

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), flanked by other members of the Telecommunications and Finance subcommittee, said the legislation would foster video competition and result in more rapid modernization of the nation’s electronic information infrastructure.

“This bill represents the nation’s road map for building the information superhighway,” Markey said. He acknowledged, however, that he expects the measure to encounter many detours and modifications before it is approved by Congress.

The proposal would repeal federal cross-ownership restrictions for cable and telephone operations, but phone companies would remain barred, with some exceptions, from buying cable systems within their own local markets.

The legislation, which has some bipartisan support, is the latest sign of increasing pressure to change the longstanding ban on phone companies providing cable service in their own service territories.

Also Monday, MCI Communications Corp. and a leading cable concern, Jones Lightwave Inc., announced an experiment that will allow consumers to use their cable TV wires for long-distance calling.

The first MCI-Jones trial, scheduled for March in Alexandria, Va., will allow residential customers to bypass Bell Atlantic, the local phone company, to make long-distance calls. A later test in a Chicago suburb will allow both local and long-distance calling over the cable TV wire, bypassing Ameritech.

The roughly 50 customers taking part in the first test will be employees of MCI or Jones. A third partner in the trial is Scientific-Atlanta Inc., a leading electronics supplier.

If MCI and Jones succeed, they will further blur the already indistinct line between phone and cable companies. The phone companies are doing their part as well; several of them are already challenging federal cross-ownership rules in the courts.

On Friday, GTE Corp. became the latest to file such a challenge. Less than two weeks after federal regulators ordered it to end its government-sanctioned experiment of providing state-of-the-art video services in Cerritos, GTE went to court, seeking to block that decision and continue its venture into cable.

The Stanford, Conn.-based telephone concern, claiming the government’s decision was unconstitutional, filed a petition Friday in the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco. It seeks to force the Federal Communications Commission to reinstate a five-year waiver, granted to GTE in 1989, to operate what was perhaps America’s most sophisticated cable system.

The FCC waiver exempted GTE from federal rules barring a single company from selling cable and telephone services to the same community. The waiver was due to expire in June, but the FCC rescinded it as of March 9.

In its statement lifting the waiver, the FCC cited a federal court’s determination in 1990 that the agency had not adequately justified allowing GTE to form a business affiliation with a local cable construction company in order to build the interactive cable system. The court at that time had sent the case back to the FCC for further consideration of the waiver, which was the only one of its kind issued by the agency.

“The FCC is precluding GTE from using its five years of experience in Cerritos . . . to provide enhanced, innovative video programming, either by itself or with . . . the local franchised CATV operator,” Geoff Gould, GTE’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a statement.

GTE spokeswoman Julia Spicer said the petition was intended not only to extend the waiver, but “to challenge the principle” that restricts telephone companies from providing cable service in their local markets.