iDEN scores new business: Pacific Wireless to be third U.S. iDEN operator

Central California, a region that some say offers the richest farmland in the world, has laid the groundwork for the dreams of all types of pioneers. Count Jeff Fuller, president and CEO of Pacific Wireless, among them.

Fuller plans to take advantage of the region's geography and capitalize on the workers who make a living off the land by building the third iDEN network in the U.S.

Pacific Wireless owns more than 300 analog 25 kHz channels of spectrum that cover the San Joaquin Valley and stretch into Reno/Tahoe, Nev., and the San Francisco Bay area. That valley stretches about 400 miles and is bordered naturally by mountains to the east and the west. That layout will allow the carrier to set itself apart from its primary and successful competitor Nextel.

"The way we will make a difference is in how we'll implement it in the field," Fuller said.

Rather than use a typical cellular architecture the way Nextel and other mobile voice players do, Pacific Wireless will build the network using a high site, high-power architecture. The operator can use the mountains for high sites. "We can be more efficient than a microcell implementation for one-to-many communication, so we can serve the dispatch user more efficiently," he said. That efficiency will result in lower rates for end users, which Fuller believes will allow Pacific Wireless to compete with Nextel.

The architecture will serve Pacific Wireless' strategy, which is to focus primarily on the dispatch component of iDEN instead of the voice side. "If you deploy a high site network, you get a tremendous footprint but you don't get deep in-building penetration," said Peter Aloumanis, director of U.S. market operations for the iDEN subscriber group in Motorola's network solutions sector. "It's used where geography and footprint are more important than `Can I talk in the elevator shaft?'" he said.

The deployment will fit the needs of the potential users in the valley, who mainly work outside in agriculture, services and land transportation businesses. The implementation is similar to Southern Linc's, which operates an iDEN network in the Southeast. In fact, Pacific Wireless consulted with Southern Linc to learn more about the architecture. But Pacific Wireless may have an advantage - mountains - that Southern Linc does not. Instead, Southern Linc uses towers, which can't reach as high as Pacific Wireless' mountain sites, Fuller said.

Pacific Wireless currently operates an existing analog specialized mobile radio system with about 10,000 users. Many of those customers will migrate to the iDEN service. Fuller also expects the market to grow as businesses in the Central Valley continue to expand.

Some outside observers question the abilities of a small company such as Pacific Wireless to compete against the well-known Nextel brand. "Has Nextel taken the best of the customers already?" asked Jane Zweig, executive vice president for Herschel Shosteck Associates. Nextel has been in the market for years, and it has a more mature network. iDEN also may be an expensive type of network to build. Motorola is the only iDEN equipment vendor, though Kyocera recently pledged to begin making handsets. Not enough networks exist around the world to drive down costs with volume.

Nonetheless, Motorola believes that more iDEN operators may pop up. "As the wireless industry has become more competitive, companies like [Pacific Wireless] see the requirement that they either have to really invest money and upgrade, or risk losing customers," Aloumanis said.

Pacific Wireless, for example, is using iDEN to upgrade its existing analog properties to digital.