All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go?

Having the capability of being reached anytime, anywhere via a single-number service is alluring -- or repugnant, depending on your subscribers' points of view. Mobile professionals and techno-heads may need and/or enjoy sporting the latest in technology, while the general population still may wish not to be found. The wireless industry obviously plays up the alluring angle in educating the masses on how wireless communications can improve their lives. Convincing subscribers that they should be interested in various wireless services is easy. The difficulty lies in convincing them to back up that interest with their wallets.

More than half (56%) of wireless users are interested in personal-number or single-number services, according to The Yankee Group report Enhanced Wireless Services: It's a Brave New World. But most aren't willing to pay more than $10 for the service, the report says. That is a lower price point than most carriers are offering.

Although single-number service is not new (AccessLine has been working on its product since 1983 and launched its first commercial service in 1988), it just recently has been in the limelight as one of several wireless intelligent network (WIN) services that carriers are beginning to provide. For a time, AccessLine was the only game in town when it came to single-number services, but in the last few years other competitors have entered the market.

If You Build It ... The beauty of single-number service is that it consolidates all of a customer's existing numbers, usually linking them to a new number that the wireless carrier issues. Single-number service comes in many packages, but in general has moved to a network-based, modular approach to appeal to a broader base of users.

Although no two vendors offer exactly the same thing, many offer similar features, and most offer a wide variety to attract the basic consumer as well as the techno-wise, high-use mobile professional.

One way that single-number service works is through sequential ringing. For example, the system could first try the office phone, then the wireless phone and then the home phone, followed by the pager. Although this method is effective, a potential complaint is that the caller may spend a lot of time waiting while the system tries one device after the other.

"That's why sequential ringing is not the best solution for a lot of people, but for some people it's the only solution," said Kimberly Tassin, AccessLine corporate communications manager.

She added that those subscribers who want sequential ringing can customize it. They can take the voice explanations off, or they can tell the caller what is going on each step of the way, she said.

To avoid the problem altogether, some vendors offer the ability to have the system ring all devices or a group of the devices in parallel.

"For people with a lot of addresses, that's really important because they never know (at) which place they're going to be located," said Andrew Dale, Priority Call Management (PCM) vice president of marketing. "The important part in rolling out services with our customers is to get the caller and the subscriber together as quickly as possible. (Parallel dialing) increases the probability that the subscriber will pick up in the 20- to 30-second range."

With AccessLine's automatic transfer, the system detects when the cellular phone is turned on and automatically routes all calls to it. Tassin also added that pagers can be integrated with the single-number service. If the subscriber is in the office but often away from his desk, he can program the system to page him if he doesn't answer the office phone. A code will appear on the pager, Tassin said, which indicates that a caller is on hold. The subscriber then can use any phone to dial into the system and pick up the call.

"That's another neat thing about having a network-based service," Tassin said. "I can use any phone to pick up that call. Salespeople use the service all the time because it means they never miss a call."

Wildfire has taken the personal-assistant approach to single-number service. Although the product offers personal-number service, its main function is that of an assistant, performing a range of personal-information and call-management functions such as taking messages, announcing callers and keeping track of schedules. Wildfire is a modular system as well, to appeal to a larger customer base.

"Part of the problem in trying to describe Wildfire is that it does do a lot, too much, really," said Leslie Anderson, Wildfire's director of corporate communications. "So in terms of unbundling the services and packaging them for the consumer market, we have broken them down into bite-size pieces for the carriers. If a carrier wanted to offer just a call-routing package, they could offer a Wildfire-based call-routing package that didn't have the other features such as voice mail or voice dialing."

BellSouth's PowerCall service is a relatively basic form of single-number service that the carrier has offered for several years. The system hunts from number to number until it either finds the subscriber or places the caller into a voice-mail system, at which point it can page the subscriber to let him know that somebody has left a message.

The system also has a priority caller list, said Jeff Battcher, BellSouth manager of media relations.

So if the subscriber wants to make sure the company president's calls gets through, he can program in the president's office number. That way if several people were trying to call at once, the president's call would go to the head of the queue and be announced as a priority caller.

... Will They Come? Product offerings for single-number service are varied and flexible, but carriers, at least in some areas, are not finding a lot of interest among their customers.

When AirTouch offered single-number service a few years ago, there was little demand, said Melissa May, AirTouch spokesperson.

"Unfortunately, it seemed a bit complicated for people," May said. "They seemed to think it was a lot of work to do the programming. Think of all the people who still have 12:00 flashing on their VCRs."

She said AirTouch did have some staunch users, but probably fewer than 100 subscribers didn't want to give up the service.

May said that companies such as Wildfire are working on the technology, and AirTouch is continuing to look at single-number services.

The company may have found an even simpler answer, however.

"What we're finding is that if people want a 1-number service, they use their mobile phone -- their digital phone, in most cases -- as the one phone they carry everywhere," she said. "It has longer battery life, so they can keep their phone on and take it everywhere they go."

The story was much the same with US West's AirTouch markets, although AirTouch currently does offer AccessLine's service in Seattle and Phoenix. According to Patti Finley, manager of media relations, the carrier has found the single-number service to be a targeted-niche service.

"We have found it popular in segments of the market or in certain types of businesses where people need to always be in touch, such as real estate professionals or physicians," Finley said. "The product hasn't appealed to the general consumer market because most consumers today still want that separation -- kind of like church and state."

She said that although behavior may change over the next 10 years, current research is telling her company that customers want complete control over their communications.

"Even though more people are moving toward wireless in the consumer segment, they still want that complete control because, really, most of our customers are still placing outgoing calls," Finley said. "I think about 90% of the calls are outgoing."

Getting consumers to the point at which they will leave their wireless phones on is an obstacle to single-number service, and it's more than changing a habit; it's changing a mindset.

As people's lives become more complex and more consumers begin experiencing information overload as a result of multiple communications devices, interest in single-number will increase, PCM's Dale predicted. Interest and action are two different things, however.

"If they don't have their phone on, they can't receive a 1-number call," he said.

He added that as battery life improves, people will be more likely to leave their phones on more often.

"Another key factor is how the service is bundled," Dale said. "One of the neat things you see PCS companies doing is giving the first minute free on incoming calls."

He said this practice helps with single-number service because the subscriber can find out who the caller is and decide whether to take the call or send the caller to voice mail. The subscriber doesn't have to pay for the decision to send that caller to voice mail.

Obviously, although carriers may offer that first minute free, they want the subscriber to continue talking.

"It does require a leap of faith," Dale said. "It requires the wireless carrier to make a judgment that if I can get people to leave their phones on, and if I can get calls to them, they will accept them and they will talk longer than one minute, on average, so that I will be able to bill them for some calls."

The Jury's Still Out On the other side of the fence from AirTouch is BellSouth, which has a waiting list of people wanting PowerCall, the company's single-number service. BellSouth is looking at two single-number service vendors, not only to solve the capacity issues, but also to offer more features. The carrier had scheduled a February trial with one of them, Battcher said. Roll-out of the new system is expected this spring.

In response to why single-number service is taking off much more rapidly in BellSouth's markets than in others, Battcher said that he thinks it is because the Southeast, and Atlanta in particular, is one of the most heavily penetrated cellular markets in the country.

"There are people here, families, that have two or three cellular phones and two lines at home," Battcher said. "So there are people with so many phone numbers in general that they want one number."

He said PowerCall is at its max.

"They are actually taking back some of the employee PowerCall numbers to sell to customers who want the service," Battcher said. "I've had to fight to keep mine."

Other carriers' situations may be somewhere in between those of AirTouch and BellSouth, but the single-number arena continues to show activity. PacBell Mobile has been conducting a trial of Wildfire and is in negotiations. BellSouth is negotiating to offer a new single-number service, and Ameritech offers its customers AccessLine's service but declined to discuss it.

Other carriers said they weren't offering the service but added that it was a possibility for the future. Still others simply didn't want to discuss what they were doing.

But if The Yankee Group report is correct, 1998 should be a critical year for single-number services.

Vendors have gone to great lengths to provide a wide variety of products that are robust yet simple for carriers to offer and simple for the consumers to use. Single-number services are all dressed up and ready to go. Now they just have to find some more killer parties.