Battle to Improve Cellphone Service Continues as Quality Is Still an Issue
By ANDREA PETERSEN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
NEW YORK -- Tooling along the streets of lower Manhattan in a white Ford Taurus station wagon, Faris Howat seems like any other commuter on his way to work -- except for the quarter of a million dollars of wireless phone equipment in his car.
Mr. Howat is a foot soldier in the battle for better cellular service.
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"I monitor the daily traffic, the lost calls and the fast busy signals on our network," says Mr. Howat, a manager of system performance at Verizon Wireless. "If there's a problem, we relay the information to the engineers and try to fix it."
As anyone who carries a cellphone knows, wireless service, which has been around for almost 20 years, still has its problems. Besides dropped calls and fast busy signals, there are "dead zones" where you can't get service at all. Seduced by plans that offer bigger buckets of calling minutes, customers are chatting more and demanding to use their phones everywhere: at home, inside office buildings, even in tunnels. The number of U.S. subscribers has more than tripled in the past five years to 109.5 million. All that traffic is taxing already-strapped networks.
Reliability -- and trust -- of the wireless networks is becoming more critical. With six national carriers competing fiercely, it is all too easy for customers to jump to another company. The carriers are pushing data services that let users buy stuff or do banking from their phones. But if subscribers are concerned about their voice calls being cut off, they will likely be very wary of doing financial transactions wirelessly. Yet the growth in network demand is sure to continue since only 40% of Americans have cellphones.
In response, the carriers are spending big bucks to beef up their service. Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC, spent $4 billion last year and plans to spend more than that this year on upgrades. Overall, the U.S. industry spent $89.6 billion last year on capital improvements, up from $24.1 billion in 1995. Last year, Sprint Corp.'s Sprint PCS added 3,000 cell sites -- the antennas, computers and software that send and receive calls. The company expects to add about the same number this year. In general, the more cell sites, the better the service. The number of U.S. cell sites industrywide jumped to 104,288 in 2000 from 22,663 in 1995.
Carriers are also dispatching people like Verizon's Mr. Howat. A metal box in the trunk of his car contains the guts of cellphones from Verizon and competitors including AT&T Wireless Group, Nextel Communications Inc. and Sprint PCS. Software prompts the phones to dial a number and hold the call for two minutes and 15 seconds -- the length of an average wireless call, Mr. Howat says. On a laptop computer in the passenger seat Mr. Howat can see which calls don't go through and which ones are dropped in the middle. If calls aren't going through on the Verizon network, Mr. Howat can prompt his engineers to check out the cell site in that area and even amplify the power of the sites adjacent to the problematic one to compensate.
Dropped calls often happen when there is a problem with the "hand off" of a call from one cell site to another. When a user is driving down the highway, for example, he or she will eventually get out of range of one cell site and the call will need to be transferred to the cell site next door. If there are already too many calls being handled by the neighboring cell site, the call will be dropped. A call also can be dropped if a user wanders into a dead zone, where no cell site has been built or the signal is blocked by buildings or other obstructions. The other bane of wireless users -- fast busy signals -- may occur when a cell site already has as many calls as it can handle.
Other things also can cause calling problems: Signals can be degraded by leaves or by the dark coatings found on some office-building windows to filter sunlight.
Many customers wonder why service in the U.S. isn't as reliable and seamless as in many other countries. One reason is that the U.S. system is a hodgepodge of different technologies and competing carriers. In contrast to the unified technology used in Europe, for instance, U.S. carriers employ several incompatible setups. It stems from the fact that the U.S. government let phone companies go their own ways.
The result is that most phones need to work on two or even three different network systems. A user who places a call on a modern digital signal can end up being flipped to an old-fashioned, scratchy analog signal, or to a different flavor of digital, as he or she moves from one cell site to another. Maintaining so many technologies adds to the complexity and cost of providing adequate calling capacity in each community.
While adding cell towers -- which can cost up to $600,000 -- is the easiest way to improve service, the carriers often face opposition. But they are coming up with creative ways to convince communities to accept the towers. Cingular Wireless added lighting to a Little League ballpark in Evergreen Park, Ill., in exchange for the right to put a cell site next to it. In Palos Hills, Ill., the company gave phone lines to the police department as an inducement.
Cellular coverage at big events such as industry conferences and football games is also improving. COWs -- an acronym for cell site on wheels -- are rolled in for the event to boost capacity. Service is also becoming available in new places. Verizon Wireless recently installed service in the railway tunnel leading to New York's Pennsylvania Station. In April, AT&T Wireless partnered with telecommunications company Concourse Communications Group to install tiny antennas inside the Newark, N.J., airport to beef up coverage inside terminals.
Big carriers including Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless and Cingular also recently paid $17 billion for new spectrum, or airwave capacity. The fate of that spectrum -- which was seized by the Federal Communications Commission from bankrupt NextWave Telecom Inc. -- has been the subject of a court battle, but if it eventually gets into the hands of the auction winners, it will likely help alleviate dropped calls and dead spots.
New technology also may help. Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS are experimenting with "smart antennas" from Metawave Communications Corp. of Redmond, Wash. These antennas boost the number of calls that a cell site can handle. Conductus Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., is selling a technology that amplifies the signal sent from a cellphone.
The biggest boost to service is likely yet to come -- in the form of the high-speed networks most carriers are getting ready to deploy. These networks, dubbed third generation or 2.5 generation (today's networks are considered second generation), are most touted for their ability to allow customers to surf the wireless Web at fast speeds and quickly zip off e-mail messages. But they will also, the carriers say, dramatically increase the capacity for standard voice calls.
Yet even after such upgrades are installed, some analysts say wireless service likely will never reach the reliability of a copper phone line. "Dropped calls are a reality of wireless," says Mark Winther, a group vice president at IDC, a Framingham, Mass., research firm. "I don't see it going away."
Ironically, some customers are dreading the day of improved service. Scott Galloway uses his erratic service to politely end annoying or lengthy calls. "Rather than saying, 'I've got to go, Mom,' I just pace over to the more receptively challenged part of my loft," says Mr. Galloway, the chief executive of Internet incubator Brand Farm Inc. in New York. "Then, boom, it cuts off and I can go watch 'The Sopranos.' "
Write to Andrea Petersen at andrea.peterson@wsj.com |
