THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, January 21, 1997 TAG: 9701210196
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 71 lines
Two months after jumping into the mobile phone wars, PrimeCo Personal Communications' chief executive says Hampton Roads is ``one of our top one or two markets.''
``We got off to a very good start. We've been very pleased with our numbers,'' Benjamin Scott, who heads the Dallas-based phone consortium, said in an interview last week.
PrimeCo, a partnership of Bell Atlantic Corp., Nynex Corp., AirTouch Communications and U S West, started its mobile phone service Nov. 13. The introduction, in 16 U.S. metro areas, was the largest simultaneous launch of a wireless phone network in the nation's history.
But it will by no means be the last. Dozens of other companies, including another six in Hampton Roads, plan to introduce wireless services over the next several years. Among the local players to come: AT&T and Sprint.
Scott declined to provide PrimeCo's subscriber numbers for Hampton Roads. But the company has just a tiny fraction of the estimated 250,000 mobile phone customers in the region.
Still, the new competition has caused mobile telephone rates to drop and coverage areas to widen.
Last week, cellular provider 360 Communications Co. announced it would eliminate or cut roaming charges for Hampton Roads customers who travel outside the region.
On Monday, GTE Mobilnet, the region's other cellular provider, said it will slash monthly rates on its most popular calling plan by as much as $10 and per-minute usage rates by up to 10 cents. GTE said it will give customers of the plan a second phone and charge no monthly fee on the second line for one year.
Newcomer PrimeCo is one of a spate of providers of something known as personal communications services - PCS for short. It's much like cellular, but its phones operate on a different frequency. And because it's digital, versus the mostly analog cellular, PCS's calls are generally clearer and its features broader.
But since it is new, it's available generally only in the most populated regions. Further complicating matters is the fact that there are three different PCS transmitting technologies in use in the United States. That means a person using a phone from a PCS company in one area can't use the phone elsewhere unless he or she is traveling in an area in which the provider uses the same transmitting mode.
The PCS companies plan to solve the problems by aggressively building more transmitters, working out cooperative agreements similar to the roaming pacts common in the cellular field, and introducing phones that automatically switch between PCS and cellular frequencies. (There are no plans to make phones that work in all three PCS modes.)
``We know that our coverage footprint is a big part of the value equation,'' Scott said, ``and we've got a very aggressive build going on this year to expand it.''
But Scott acknowledged that PrimeCo has hit snags. Currently, a PrimeCo customer traveling on Interstate 64 toward Richmond will lose service just west of Oyster Point Road in Newport News, then run into spotty coverage well into New Kent County on the other side of Williamsburg.
PrimeCo is trying to solve the problem by locating a key transmitter in York County. The county delayed approval for several months, only last week approving the tower on the condition that another wireless company put a transmitter on the structure alongside PrimeCo's. So far, PrimeCo doesn't have a co-user of the site.
Joseph O'Konek, general manager of PrimeCo's Hampton Roads-Richmond service area, said another key hole his company must fill is coverage inside the region's tunnels. He said he expects PrimeCo to have special devices known as repeaters inside the Hampton Roads and Monitor-Merrimac tunnels by midsummer.
It will likely be 1998 before PrimeCo begins locating transmitters on North Carolina's Outer Banks and on Route 460 between Suffolk and the Richmond area, O'Konek said.