Wireless Trends>
From Phildelpia Inquirer
By Patricia Horn
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
For years, the tantalizing promise of local phone competition has been stymied by squabbles among established phone companies and
would-be competitors over access to the copper-wire and fiber-optic-cable phone network.
But as those squabbles have dragged on, technology is developing bypasses around those phone roadways.
Those bypasses include such innovative new technologies as providing phone service over the cable-TV networks, or wireless technologies that
work as a portable phone in the home and a mobile phone away from home.
Those two technologies are still being developed in labs around the country. But one technology is already here: cell phones.
More and more, people are placing their phone calls from their cell phones and not their traditional, or wireline, phones.
That shift in voice traffic from traditional in-home phones to cellular phones helped drive yesterday's $1.7 billion sale of Comcast's
cellular-phone operations to SBC Communications Inc., of San Antonio, Texas. (The selling price is called into question. Business, C1) It
also helped drive the earlier frenzied bidding for Airtouch Communications Inc. by Vodafone, Bell Atlantic Corp. and, briefly, MCI WorldCom.
Karen Packman, 33, of Mount Laurel, is typical of the people who are switching most of their calling from traditional landline phones to cellular
phones.
She dropped her home phone service more than a year ago, after her boyfriend gave her a Sprint PCS phone. She had never owned a cell
phone before.
"It was almost a nuisance to have a phone. People would leave a message, and I would have to worry about checking my messages," she said
when asked why she dropped her traditional phone service. "It was easier to have a phone always with me so I wouldn't play phone tag as
much."
Packman once again has a traditional wireline phone. But she still gets and places most of her calls on her cellular phone.
Wireless-phone companies and telecommunications researchers say full-time users of wireless phones typically are college students, single
young mobile workers, and independent business consultants.
Other people are cutting back on the extra-cost options they have on their standard home or business phone lines as they make more calls on
their mobile phones.
Tim Henry, who has a Philadelphia interior-design business, said he cut back all of the options on his home phone, including long-distance,
because using his wireless phone costs him less.
Companies such as AT&T already are marketing wireless phones as an alternative to getting a second or third phone line. Perhaps not
coincidentally, increased use of wireless phones would mean AT&T likely would be paying the Baby Bells less to use their local phone
networks.
AT&T also is experimenting with offering local phone service to customers in Dallas using a hybrid phone that works like a portable phone
inside the home, and switches to a cellular phone when the user is a certain distance away from home.
Over the next three to five years, as prices for wireless phone calls are expected to drop and technology improves, telecommunications-industry
analysts foresee more and more people cutting the cord.
After all, it's easier to reach people who always have their phones with them. And if you don't want to get a call, you simply send all calls to
voice mail.
"This is absolutely going to occur," Bell Atlantic Mobile regional president John Stratton said. "It complements the reality of present-day life.
People are moving around."
Stratton said he believes the migration from wired to wireless phones will increase dramatically in the next year because of new calling plans
such as his company's Single Rate and AT&T's Digital One Rate.
Over the past 10 years, the average consumer at Bell Atlantic Mobile made 60 to 70 minutes of calls a month, said Stratton. Today, the average
consumer on Bell's Single Rate plan is using 300 minutes per month.
"This is a revolution, not an evolution," Stratton said. "In 12 months, we'll say, 'Wow, the change we thought would take two or three years has
happened in 12 months.' "
The vast majority of the nearly 70,000 U.S. subscribers to wireless service have not given up the wireline phone.
According to the Yankee Group, a telecommunications research firm in Boston, only 5 percent of voice phone calls are made today on wireless
phones. Yankee sees that rising to 20 percent by 2003 or 2004.
Not all of that increase will come at the expense of traditional phones; instead, the use of wireless phones is inspiring consumers to make more
calls and to place some calls on wireless phones that they would have made on traditional home phones.
Currently, calls on wireless phones are only displacing calls on traditional phones in niche markets, said Stan Sigman, SBC Wireless' chief
executive.
"The best example are the young-professional apartment dwellers who are never in the apartment," he said. "As broad-scale displacement, the
technology isn't ready to be an alternative for wired service."
Mark Lowenstein, a wireless analyst with Yankee Group, said technological challenges and prices of wireless phones and service are still
obstacles to people using mobile phones exclusively.
For one thing, he said, most callers still pay a premium to place a call on a wireless phone unless they are high-volume callers.
In addition, consumers can't share a wireless phone or have the same number on multiple phones.
E-mail is another stumbling block: Wireless phones still cannot easily or reliably be used to get e-mail or send data, Lowenstein said.
Cliff Mautner, an independent photographer, has watched his cell-phone bills drop over the last several years from more $500 a month to $150.
Because he doesn't have an office, his business phone is his Comcast Metrophone phone.
"I don't need another phone. I'm on location shooting various assignments all day long. I don't sit in an office." |
