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Note to FCC: CPP is Dead
The “Hurry Up & Wait” article by William J. Sill & Christiana Lin (Jan. 15) reminded me that nobody appears to have told the FCC that the funeral for calling party pays (CPP) already has been held. I don’t know how likely it is that the FCC can bring it back from the dead.

Standards activity on CPP ceased as soon as CTIA cancelled funding for technical-standards development early in 1999 (before the FCC initiated its rule-making). It is certainly true that there are important regulatory issues that need to be addressed before CPP can be a nationwide service in the United States, but adaptations of standards (both formal and de facto) are equally important. Without modifications to ISUP signaling or the LIDB database format, and without an agreed-to method for exchanging landline (EMI/EMR) and wireless (CIBER) billing records, there can be no nationwide CPP. In fact, you can argue that standards are more important, because they are needed equally as much in Canada and other countries as in the United States if CPP is ever to become a viable service.
David Crowe
www.cnp-wireless.com

Wireline Has Much to Offer
I was ready to comment on the great strides that US West PCS is having in combining its wireline data and wireless service. After reading your Views (“ADSL-OW,” by Rhonda L. Wickham, Jan. 15), I thought I would address your editorial instead.

It’s interesting that you took to putting down traditional telecom companies in their efforts to provide high-speed Internet access to their customers. Your comments simply highlight the deep divisions that already exist between wireless and wireline industries. Instead of trying to highlight the fact that both communities have a lot to learn from each other and the benefits that both could reap from a symbiotic relationship, you treaded only on the shortcomings of wireline data. Your quote, “I’ve chosen not to commit to anything that isn’t 99% yet,” seems hypocritical. You must use a cellular phone, right? Wireless technologies are far from perfect with plenty of inherit problems such as dropped calls, system busies and static.

I would hope that you could see that wireline technologies have a great deal to offer wireless. We should look for solutions that integrate wireline, not dismiss it as a separate technology that is of no use to our industry.
Karl Ness
MyAgony4@aol.com

Great observation. However, the difference is that my company pays for my wireless usage, and I would be paying for my home ADSL/cable usage. I think many business people follow the same mixed-expectation scenario.

The wireless industry is famous, or infamous, for its quality issues. However, I must have a wireless angel because in my 16+ years of wireless-phone use, I can count the number of times my call has dropped in my home territory on one hand.

So, even though my company pays for my wireless phone usage, they get a pretty good deal.
— Rhonda L. Wickham

Cell-Site-to-Tech Ratios
Read with great interest Barb Lee’s article, “Reliable Daisy-Chain Designs” (Jan. 1). One item that is currently a very dated spec is the cell-sites-to-technician ratios. She mentions that the industry average is currently 10:1 and heading toward 25:1. The industry (at least PCS) average is well past that already. The industry average is closer to 40:1 (at least with the companies I’m familiar with, e.g. BellSouth, Triton Suncom, AT&T, Sprint, Airgate), with some companies as high as 100:1.

This makes the remote-test capability mentioned in the article even more critical than stated.
E. Kirk Ellis
Senior Field Engineer
BellSouth Mobility DCS
kirke@goldsboro.net