Seattle Testing Pay Phones on Ferries, Buses : Cellular System Comes to Mass-Transit Market

As the Metro bus rolled through downtown Seattle toward the city’s east side, an hour’s ride away, a woman moved onto the right-front seat, slipped a credit card into the telephone installed there and--like E. T.--phoned home.

Hundreds of curious Metro commuters have tried the cellular pay phones that NewVector Communications installed this week on five Metro buses. The bus phones, added to those operating since Sept. 5 on two ferries plying Puget Sound, have made Seattle a pioneer in what NewVector, at least, thinks will become an important cellular telephone market: mass-transit systems.

Amtrak also plans to begin offering cellular telephone service on Metroliners running between Washington and New York early next year through Airfone Inc., a joint venture of Goeken Communications and Western Union. And some airlines already offer phone service.

New Technology

Seattle’s Metro, which competes for passengers with private automobiles, decided to try offering phone service after watching the enthusiasm with which Seattle motorists accepted the high-quality transmissions made possible by the new cellular technology, said B. J. Carol, customer-assistance supervisor and pay-phone project manager for the bus system.

“We felt that this was something we want to check out,” she said. “It adds a passenger amenity.”

The Washington State Ferry System similarly is testing commuter response to cellular pay phones on ferries crossing from Seattle to Bremerton, an hour away, and on the 35-minute run to Winslow on Bainbridge Island.

“We think it is going to be a very useful tool for the business people we carry back and forth between Seattle and the Kitsap County area we serve,” said Pat Patterson, a spokesman for Washington State Ferries.

The bus and boat tests came at the initiative of NewVector Communications, a subsidiary of Denver-based US West, one of the seven regional holding companies formed after the breakup of the Bell System.

NewVector, headquartered in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, operates cellular mobile telephone networks--similar to those operated by PacTel Mobile Access in Southern California--in Seattle, Tacoma, Salt Lake City, Denver, Albuquerque, Phoenix and Tucson.

OKI Telecom of Hackensack, N.J., supplied the pay phones, which accept Visa, MasterCard and American Express credit cards.

Before Seattle’s cellular network started operation in July, 1984, spotty radiotelephone service was available to callers on the move. But its quality and capacity were severely limited by the fact that a single receiver-transmitter handled all calls.

Static, Echoes Common

With only a handful of available channels, busy signals were more common than dial tones. When a call could be completed, static and echoes competed with the callers, and the quality changed as buildings and geography came between the transmitter and the caller.

Patterson said that radiotelephones were once installed briefly aboard the ferries but that callers were turned off by the lack of privacy--”anyone with a radio could tune in the channel”--and the poor broadcast reception.

Cellular technology overcomes such obstacles, offering almost unlimited capacity and the quality of reception and privacy of stationary phones, cellular service firms say.

In a cellular system, when the radio signal begins to weaken, a microprocessor within the caller’s telephone signals the central switching office to shift the call to a cell offering a stronger beam. This “handing off” takes less than a 20th of a second and occurs without the caller’s awareness. Because of the network’s cellular composition, a single channel can handle several calls simultaneously without interference as long as they occur in different cells. As the number of users increases in a given service area, cells can be subdivided to boost capacity.

Free During Trial

Seattle’s commuter pay phones are offering free calling during a brief introductory period. A blank credit card attached to the phones enables the curious to place calls.

“We’re trying to familiarize people with how the phones actually work, the various applications they offer, and just trying to make them comfortable with them,” said Patterson of Washington State Ferries.

Starting next week, however, NewVector will begin charging 50 cents a minute with a two-minute or $1 minimum, said Laury Bryant of the US West subsidiary. (Amtrak expects to charge $4.75 for the first three minutes and $1 for each additional minute.)

On the two ferries so far equipped with phones--two more vessels are being hooked up--callers line up “four and five deep” to make free calls, Bryant said. “We’ve been logging 500 calls a day on just the two ferries.”

If passengers are as willing to pay for their calls during the next few months of the trial, service could be expanded to additional boats and buses, she said.