By any other name

AT&T Wireless has elected to call its digital cellular service Digital PCS. More power to them as much of the wireless industry fell for this bit of nomenclature sleight-of-hand.

Not that the way wasn't paved for AT&T. PCS has become the term of the day. Sprint grew so enamored that, at PCS '96 last month, it changed its rather snazzy Sprint Spectrum name to Sprint PCS. This was done with all the pomp and fanfare usually reserved for outright service launches. Never mind that much of the public still may not know what the acronym stands for.

The AT&T service moniker promptly set off a debate within wireless circles over whether its service-essentially the digital upgrade of its nationwide analog cellular-is "genuine PCS." AT&T certainly believes so, citing system coverage as well as the cost and size of the phones. Companies with wireless licenses outside the 800 MHz band dispute the claim, however.

All this is symptomatic of an industry that loves to talk to itself rather than customers.

It reminds me of some of the late-night discussions I had in college with cinema buffs. Hollywood made movies, we would say pejoratively, holding such commercial entertainment in low esteem. The French, on the other hand, made films, thus elevating directors such as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard to a whole new plane. The crux of the debate was that the French embraced American directors from the Hollywood studio system. So, we would argue into the night, are John Ford movies really films?

Lost in the channel noise is the simple fact that many of the offerings that will differentiate wireless services from each other, such as e-mail, voice mail and caller ID, won't be available from AT&T until next year. All it did this week was co-opt a name.

People have long said that cellular is PCS. Craig McCaw, former owner of the network of systems that became AT&T Wireless, would often say that anything PCS could do, digital cellular could do as well or better. A well-engineered, 800-MHz cellular system-even a 12-year-old one-should be able to operate just as a new 1.9 GHz PCS system. Success will hinge on customer experience and perception, not on how it's classified.

And just why has cellular become such as bad word, anyway? If some new PCS providers wanted to really throw a wrench into matters, they would start calling themselves cellular companies. After all, the term has been in the public consciousness more than a decade.

I'm all for self-definition, but as a customer I reserve the right to judge the quality of the service and content. Orson Welles considered himself a filmmaker. Then again, so did Ed Wood.