Hang-Ups Plague Cellular Service : Popularity of PacTel System Causing Problems for Users
Whether he’s driving his Ferrari or his four-wheel-drive truck, Mark Johnson knows he’s going to run into problems using his mobile cellular telephones in Orange and Los Angeles counties.
“It’s a zoo out there,” says Johnson, who spends about two hours each day on his car phone, handling business interests that span from medical supply distribution to office building construction. “At least 10 times a day, I either can’t make a call or I get cut off in the middle of one.”
Johnson is hardly alone in his criticism of cellular service in the Los Angeles area. Even PacTel Mobile Access in Costa Mesa, the cellular subsidiary of Pacific Telesis that serves Southern California, admits it is having problems handling customers in portions of its sprawling four-county territory.
System Too Popular
Unlike virtually all the rest of the nation’s 101 cellular carriers, however, PacTel’s problems are largely the result of operating a system that is too popular, particularly with customers in the affluent, status-conscious communities of western Los Angeles and southern Orange counties.
Currently, some 19 months after it introduced cellular service in the Los Angeles region, PacTel has more than 47,000 subscribers. Not only is the number more than twice the company’s original projections, but it accounts for a full 25% of all the cellular users in the nation.
“When we started in June, 1984, all we could do was make guesses about how well we’d be accepted,” says Trevor Jones, PacTel’s president. “But the people have taken to the service faster than we thought.”
As a result of what is literally an overwhelming response, PacTel says it is scrambling to increase its service capacity. The company, which currently has 32 transmission towers beaming cellular telephone frequencies across Southern California, plans to add another 32 towers both this year and next for a total of nearly 100 by the end of 1987. When the company began service in June, 1984, it had 16 towers.
Analysts attribute the roaring success of cellular telephones here to Southern California’s longstanding love affair with its automobiles, the lengthy commutes of many workers and the region’s general affluence--which allows nearly 50,000 families to spend an average of $150 per month for telephone service in their cars.
But PacTel’s success has other causes beyond sheer popularity of mobile telephones.
Perhaps the most important are the legal and regulatory hassles that have prevented PacTel’s only competitor for Southern California’s cellular business from beginning service as originally forecast. Currently, Los Angeles Cellular Telephone expects to initiate service in the region in late 1986, about a full year behind schedule and more than two years after PacTel started.
Another reason that cellular telephones have caught on so rapidly, analysts say, is that they represent a vast improvement over the nation’s woefully inadequate mobile telephone network.
Electronic Switching
The older mobile telephone system, which still exists, uses radio channels beamed from a single tower over a radius of up to 75 miles. Cellular service, on the other hand, is carried by antennas and transmission towers that serve areas with a radius of 2 1/2 miles to about 10 miles. As motorists drive along, their calls are electronically passed from one service area to the next without any interruption in service.
With cellular’s smaller service areas, called cells, more calls can be accommodated on each radio frequency channel, and the transmission on the calls is sharper than on older mobile telephones.
However, the technological advances have not yet been enough to satisfy the demand in some of PacTel’s service area, a 7,000-square-mile territory that covers all of Los Angeles and Orange counties and the western portions of Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
Although the company won’t divulge precise subscriber information, officials say a sizable percentage of users live and work in the communities along the San Diego Freeway from Los Angeles International Airport to the Sepulveda Pass and in a swathe of Orange County that stretches from Tustin to Laguna Hills.
West L.A. in Particular
The imbalance means that customers in such low-demand areas as San Bernardino have relatively few problems while subscribers in western Los Angeles often have long waits to get on the system.
“It can take up to five tries to get on a channel,” says Ronald Rader, a real estate broker who generally spends about an hour a day on his cellular phone while cruising to appointments on the Westside. “And I don’t understand why PacTel has spent money promoting the service when they should have put it into new equipment.”
PacTel officials say they are continuing to advertise and accept new subscribers because they anticipate losing a portion of their customers when their competitor begins service.
In addition, Jones says PacTel plans to install another six towers on the Westside this year, bringing the area’s total to 14. In Orange County, the region’s other overloaded area, PacTel says it will double the number of towers to 12 by the end of the year.
Further, Jones says company engineers are continuing to discover ways to increase the capacity of their existing system. This “fine tuning,” as Jones calls it, in some cases will double current capacity.
66 Channels Available
Jones says PacTel also is lobbying aggressively with the Federal Communications Commission to increase the allocation of radio frequencies to cellular service. Currently, the commission has set aside a total of 66 channels in each cellular region for cellular use. In a decision expected later this year, the commission may allocate an additional 24 channels for cellular telephones.
Meanwhile, some cellular users aren’t holding their breaths.
“I’ve got using this thing down to a science,” Johnson says. “I know most of the places where I’m going to have trouble and lose my connection. So I tell whomever I’m talking to that I’ll call back as soon as I get to a better place.”
