Pacific Bell Mobile Services Signs Contract To Commercially Deploy "Wildfire" In California, Nevada

Pleasanton, California, February 23, 1998

Pacific Bell will announce at today's Cellular Telephone Industry Association Conference in Atlanta that it has entered into a commercial agreement with Wildfire Communications, Inc. to provide a wireless version of Wildfire's voice-activated electronic assistant to its PCS customers in California and Nevada.

Pacific Bell plans to introduce Wildfire in major California markets by this summer. Pacific Bell helped design and develop the wireless version of Wildfire through a trial it conducted in San Diego last year.

Wildfire's speech-recognition technology was recently recognized by The New York Times and Business Week as being a convenient, user-friendly service that lets users place and receive calls by simple spoken commands.

Pacific Bell Mobile Services provides leading-edge wireless communications in key markets throughout California and in Reno and Las Vegas, Nevada.

It is a company of SBC Communications Inc., a global leader in the telecommunications industry, with more than 33 million access lines and 5.5 million wireless customers across the United States, as well as investments in telecommunications businesses in 10 countries. Under the Southwestern Bell, Pacific Bell, Nevada Bell and Cellular One brands, SBC, through its subsidiaries, offers a wide range of innovative services, including local and long-distance telephone service, wireless communications, paging, Internet access, and messaging, as well as telecommunications equipment, and directory advertising and publishing. SBC (www.sbc.com) has more than 116,000 employees and reported 1997 revenues of $25 billion. SBC's equity market value of $67.3 billion (as of December 31, 1997) ranks it as one of the five largest telecommunications companies in the world.