
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, June 9, 1994                   TAG: 9406100009
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: B-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

YOUR NUMBER'S UP SOON

The FCC is expected to take initial steps today on a plan crucial to bringing consumers the next generation of mobile communications - a personal, portable phone number.

Dubbed the next generation of mobile telephone, numbers would be assigned to a person, rather than a place, making users always reachable.

Development of the service, called the broad-band personal communications service, had been delayed while federal regulators considered how to distribute licenses for it.

The Federal Communications Commission is expected to adopt a revised licensing plan today. On June 29, the FCC will adopt rules for auctioning off the licenses, probably this fall. The auction is expected to add billions of dollars to the federal Treasury.

The new phones are not expected to be available until 1995 at the earliest.

The new plan is not dramatically different from the licensing rules the FCC adopted last year. But it does try to address critics' concerns that the original configuration could make it difficult, if not impossible, for some companies to operate viable businesses, because they would have portions of the airwaves that were too small or too widely separated from one another.

A license entitles a company to operate on a sliver of the public airwaves and to provide service to designated geographic areas. The new plan would allow six licensees in each geographic market, whereas the old plan would have allowed seven. Three licensees would be assigned to major slices of the airways and to large geographic areas. Three other licensees would be assigned to smaller slices of the airways and to small geographic areas.

Details of the new plan were discussed by industry executives and confirmed by an FCC official, all speaking on condition of anonymity.

There are more than 400 smaller metropolitan areas and 51 major areas, and the specter of a multibillion-dollar business has attracted the attention of established players - from cable, telephone and cellular companies - to entrepreneurs.

By 2004, between 17 million and 29 million people are expected to subscribe to the new service, according to analysts' and consultants' estimates.

by CNB