Paging Segment Shifts

Circular Calling Card Provides Distinction 360 degrees Communications is attempting to run circles around the competition. The company has designed a pre-paid calling card that is die-cut in the shape of a circle. The card, designed to fit ina wallet, measures 21/4 inches in diameter and sports a large, apple-green 360 degrees logo in the center. The card is available in $10 and $20 denominations.

Besides attracting long-distance users, the card also may attract collectors. Collectors are snapping up phone cards, paying as much as $1,500 for some rare cards. Some of the newer cards that are highly collectible feature die-cut shapes, holograms, hot or foil stamping or an extra-large size, according to PCM Report, an on-line publication that covers the phone-card industry.

Vendors Supply Equipment to Enhance Student Safety Safety and security of the nation's school children has come into focus in the last few years. The fact that wireless technology can be used to aid that cause has not been lost on the industry, as carriers seek to fulfill their own market expansion needs.

A nationwide school-grant program will provide Ericsson digital phones and AT&T wireless service to 1,000 schools across the United States in an effort to increase safety and enhance the learning environment.

Each school selected for the Safe Schools Program will receive two digital PCS phones and 160 minutes of local airtime per month throughout the school year. The phones will be assigned to security guards, parking lot monitors, adult crossing guards, playground supervisors, parents traveling with students on field trips and other adults who are responsible for the students' safety.

A recent Motorola market study revealed that an emerging reason for pager purchase is personal safety, and parents are increasingly using pagers to keep track of their children. For its part, Motorola is promoting pagers as tools that can provide a sense of security through its safety guide for parents called Kids Safe & Sound.

The guide is an interactive publication that focuses on the safety of children from birth to age 10.

Wireless Never Dies in Hollywood Ericsson will award a 1998 BMW to a mobile phone salesperson as part of a sweepstakes created to drive sales and excitement around Ericsson's co-promotion in Tomorrow Never Dies, the new James Bond film. Retail salespeople can enter their name in the drawing each time they sell an Ericsson phone from Oct. 27, 1997 to Feb. 14, 1998. Other prizes include "Bond Tours to London," watches and Tomorrow Never Dies merchandise. The company also is conducting a consumer sweepstakes.

The latest Bond film features Agent 007 relying on Ericsson phones to help him out of difficult situations. One of the most important gadgets in the film is a concept phone that Bond uses several times throughout the movie. Although the phone used in the film is not available today, it is "a metaphor for the power of technology," according to Ericsson.

Good News on the Fraud Front The federal government is attempting to do its part in the fight against wireless fraud. The Senate recently passed legislation to strengthen penalties against wireless phone cloners. S. 493, the Wireless Telephone Protection Act, was sponsored by U.S. Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), and was passed unanimously in the Senate.

"It's illegal to clone a wireless phone," said Thomas E. Wheeler, president of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA). "Now we are on the road to making it illegal to manufacture and sell the equipment that is designed purely to facilitate this illegal activity."

The next step is passage of companion bill H.R. 2460, currently being reviewed by the House of Representatives.

Carriers also are working to protect themselves and their customers from wireless phone cloning. In St. Paul, MN, AirTouch recently aided police officials in a sting operation that centered around a simulated cellular storefront. AirTouch provided signs, training, equipment and cellular airtime. Undercover officers sold cloned phones from the location, gathering evidence that led to the arrests of people using cloned cellular phones to conduct illegal drug sales.

In Atlanta, an effort with AirTouch Cellular, BellSouth Mobility and Price Communications Wireless helped shut down a cellular phone cloning operation. The cloning ring targeted Price Communications Wireless, but the three carriers worked together using direction-finding equipment and other investigative techniques to identify the suspects and the business where the cloning was taking place. Police seized more than 200 stolen cellular number/ESN combinations, 126 cloned phones, cloning equipment and computers, two vehicles and all business records.

BellSouth Mobility DCS Adds E-mail Service BellSouth Mobility DCS customers can receive and reply to e-mail messages on their wireless digital phones from anywhere on BellSouth's DCS network. The service, which uses TWS' bulletIN technology, allows customers to receive messages on demand without a laptop. Features include the ability to receive custom short messages, forward messages to the nearest fax machine and receive specialized information on demand such as stock quotes, headline news and sports scores.

The technology comprises a software package that ties into a network operator's digital message center to forward information.

Wireless, Wireline Voice Mail Converge US West has begun offering its Denver customers a consolidated wireline and wireless voice mailbox, allowing them to use the same voice mailbox to store messages from both home or office landline phones and wireless phones. The service provides message notification on both customer devices. When a call is left on the voice mailbox, the user will be notified at home with a stutter tone and on the PCS handset with short-message service. Pager notification also is available.

US West had planned to offer the consolidated voice mail service in Colorado Springs, Greeley and Fort Collins by the end of 1997 and additional cities this year.

Olympics Provide Wireless Opportunities Cellular, PCS and paging carriers will be able to offer sports enthusiasts the opportunity to keep up with Olympic news from Nagano, Japan, this February through text messages sent to their pagers and wireless phones in a "pay-per-view" format. Intelligent Information Incorporated, with its Winter Olympics Wireless Information Package, will offer three timed messages a day throughout the course of the games. Each morning, subscribers will receive a summary of the medal winners featuring the previous night's major events. A mid-day message will include medal winners for minor events and coverage of the U.S. hockey team. A final evening message will include breaking news, event previews or medal updates showing the top five medal-winning nations to date.

Looking ahead to the 2002 Winter Olympics in the Salt Lake City, UT, area, AirTouch has constructed a new cellular transmission site at the Deer Valley Resort Lodge. Most visitors won't even know the site is there, according to AirTouch, because it was designed to look like three ordinary flagpoles. Deer Valley is scheduled to be the site for the slalom and freestyle skiing events, which means large crowds and an increased need for on-the-spot, flexible voice and data communications on the mountain as well as in the lodge.

According to statistics compiled after the Olympics last year, as many as 750,000 additional cellular calls were placed in Atlanta during the games. Although the Deer Valley site was designed to help meet increased demand in 2002, AirTouch said it would be able to reap the benefits of extra coverage in the meantime.

GSM MoU Members Vote for Roaming Tariff New charging agreements will provide GSM mobile phone customers with clear information on the cost of international roaming. The GSM MoU Association's global membership has voted to accept the principle of an inter-operator tariff (IOT), a wholesale tariff for roaming services. The IOT will replace a complex system of charges based on calculations that include the retail price of a foreign network's national tariff. Under the new system, each operator will apply a pre-agreed tariff for a set period to all of its roaming partners.

Web Gurus Stay Connected on the Road During a recent 2,000-mile cross-country road trip, staff members of the Internet's Cool Site of the Day maintained two web sites, designed and produced graph ics, wrote copy, updated a trip diary and kept up with e-mail and chat groups using GTE's wireless data network. GTE provided wireless access to the World Wide Web (WWW), including airtime, phones, modems and cables to provide the staffers a traveling office.

Producers of Cool Site of the Day, a guide to what's "cool" on the WWW, unplugged from their Norfolk, VA, base and loaded into a 30-foot RV to visit nominees for the Cool Site of the Year award, maintaining their data-intensive jobs while on the road.

"We wanted to show business customers how the wireless network could satisfy some of the most demanding, data-intensive customers on the planet," said Mike Pawlowski, director, business marketing and planning-data for GTE Wireless.

The RV was equipped with several networked laptops with Megahertz cellular PC card modems.

When the crew members were ready to transmit, they would activitate their modem to dial in to GTE's Windows NT servers. They were able to establish a reliable connection even while the RV was on the move.

In Other News ... Western Wireless has completed the acquisition of Triad Cellular, including all of Triad's cellular properties and related assets. With the acquisition, Western Wireless gained 12 RSA licenses covering about 1 million POPs in Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah, as well as more than 55,000 subscribers.

Crispaire's now a part of Airxcel, a new company that links Crispaire with a company formerly known as Recreation Vehicle Products. Airxcel is based in Wichita.

Clearnet demonstrated the handoff of calls from its PCS cdmaOne network at 1.9GHz to an existing analog AMPS infrastructure using another vendor's equipment. CdmaOne is a universal term for IS-95-based CDMA specifications established by the CDMA Development Group.

The Personal Communications Industry Association (PCIA) has published "Priority Actions for Timely Compliance: Safety Measures for Building-Based Antenna Sites." The document is posted in the public viewing section of PCIA's web site (www.pcia.com) and is available upon request.

Ericsson will establish a new RF-power design center in Philadelphia. The company already operates an assembly and design center for RF products in Morgan Hill, CA. Separately, Ericsson and Tellabs have extended their collaboration partnership for another seven years.

Arch Communications has expanded its transmission capacity with the purchase of a fourth satellite channel from SpaceCom. The new channel will accommodate increases in paging traffic expected to result from Arch's addition of 50 new downlink sites.

The number of personal paging users surged from 4 million to more than 21 million over the last five years, while the number of intense business users grew more moderately -- from 9.2 million to 12.5 million.

In a move perhaps designed to prevent a repeat of the financial disaster surrounding the PCS C-block, the FCC has postponed the auction for local multipoint distribution service (LMDS) until Feb. 18. The auction for the fixed, broadband, point-to-multipoint microwave service in the 28GHz band originally was scheduled for Dec. 10, 1997.

"The commission feels that the postponement will further opportunities for businesses to access additional sources of capital to further the advent of new competition in the cable TV and local telephone marketplace," the agency said in a statement announcing the new auction date.

LMDS will offer a variety of 1- and 2-way broadband services, such as video programming distribution, video telephony and high-speed data transmission, including Internet access. Because of its multipurpose applications and ability to deliver bundled services, LMDS is a potential major competitor to local exchange and cable TV services, according to the FCC.

The Strategis Group described LMDS as "an extraordinary opportunity to alter the face of the communications industry" and predicted that total bidswould amount to more than $4 billion. Licenses in dense urban markets could rais e as much as $30 per POP, while less-dense markets may go for about $9 per POP, according to Strategis. Rural markets without the population and density needed to justify the construction of full-service networks may go for just pennies a POP, Strategis analysts predicted.

"Not since cellular spectrum was first allocated in the early 1980s has a wireless technology presented such a unique opportunity," said Elliott Hamilton of Strategis, which forecasts that LMDS will earn more than $7 billion in annual service revenues by 2007.

At an operations level, LMDS systems will consist of a multicell network with return-path capability within the assigned spectrum. Each cell will contain a centrally located transmitter, multiple receivers or transceivers and point-to-point links connecting the cell with a central processing center and/or other cells.

Dan Ernst, also of Strategis, said the network-design challenges of LMDS would require carriers to approach their strategy on a market-by-market basis.

"The bottom line comes down to residential and business demand density," Ernst said. "Markets out of the top 200 will not support the development of networks with broad coverage and a wide array of services."

The FCC will license 1,300MHz of LMDS spectrum in each of 493 BTAs. A-block licenses will include 1,150MHz; B-block licenses will account for the remaining 150MHz.

The new LMDS auction schedule is as follows:

* FCC Form 175 filing deadline: Jan. 20 * Deadline for ordering bidding software: Feb. 2 * Upfront payment deadline: Feb. 2 * Mock auction: Feb. 13 * Auction begins: Feb. 18 (9 a.m. EST)