Cable & Wireless customers will receive one extra bill in their mailboxes next month as part of a strategy by the long distance company to offer more innovative pricing plans.

Cable & Wireless has placed several full-page newspaper advertisements informing customers that next month, they will receive a bill for long-distance charges in addition to a bill for local service from the Bermuda Telephone Company.

The change applies to business and residential Cable & Wireless customers with landline telephones. Customers with mobile phones will continue to pay long distance charges through their cellular provider, although Cable & Wireless plans to eventually send separate bills for those phones, too.

The move defies telephone industry conventions: most of the world's direct-dial long distance providers - including Cable & Wireless's main competitor, TeleBermuda International - collect revenue through local telephone companies, which detail long distance charges alongside local service fees on customer phone bills.

According to Cable & Wireless spokeswoman Charmaine Burgess, the company plans to offer pricing plans that could not be accommodated by the Bermuda Telephone Company's billing system.

Coupled with the ability to communicate with customers directly, the company is convinced that going it alone will be worth the added administrative and mailing costs.

Although it will no longer provide billing services for Cable & Wireless, BTC has not reduced its fees. Ms Burgess explained that BTC's interconnection charge - a fee for connecting long distance carrier's international links with local telephones, which includes billing services - was reduced to five cents on November 1, but not because of the separate billing arrangement.

Ms Burgess downplayed the inconvenience of paying two telephone bills every month instead of one. As with BTC, customers will be able to pay Cable & Wireless bills through automated teller machines.

The company expects to offer online billing soon and also consolidate the bills of small businesses which subscribe to the company's commercial Internet service in addition to long distance.

"I think our customers will be very pleased" with the "innovative pricing plans," Ms Burgess said, although she would not release any details of the new plans or a timetable for their introduction.