PacTel Loses Pact to Serve County Freeway Phones
The Orange County Transportation Commission said Thursday that it is ousting PacTel Cellular as the provider of telephone service for freeway call boxes in favor of Los Angeles Cellular Telephone Co., a move the agency said would save $1 million over 10 years.
Los Angeles Cellular, which competes with Irvine-based PacTel Cellular to provide mobile phone service in much of Southern California, will also provide service for the new network of call boxes that will soon be installed along freeways in San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
When the 1,100-phone Orange County call box system was installed in 1987, the county signed a 10-year contract with PacTel Cellular to provide the service. The boxes use the same cellular phone network as regular car phones to put distressed motorists directly in touch with the California Highway Patrol.
But at PacTel’s insistence, the contract included a clause allowing either party to cancel on six months’ notice, said Jim Kenan, OCTC chief deputy director.
And with San Bernardino and Riverside counties moving toward installation of a 1,500- to 2,000-phone call box system, Orange County decided to join forces with them in asking for bids on the service contract.
PacTel had been providing service to Orange County at a rate of $16 per month per box, including up to 65 minutes per month of usage for each box. The company re-bid for the new contract at the same price, according to a PacTel spokeswoman.
L.A. Cellular, however, came in with a bid of $10.50 per month per box for the first five years and $11.50 per box for the second five years. Kenan said L.A. Cellular had also agreed to give call box traffic priority over regular mobile phone traffic if the network were to be overloaded at any time. The lower price will save the OCTC $5,000 to $6,000 per month, Kenan said.
Kenan said the OCTC will ask PacTel to waive the six-month cancellation period and allow it to move to the cheaper system as soon as possible. Currently, the OCTC spends about $215,000 per year on cellular service. Both the service and the phones themselves--manufactured by Comarco of Anaheim--are financed by a $1-per-year vehicle-registration surcharge.
The contract should provide revenues of about $400,000 per year for L.A. Cellular in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and that figure could increase if Los Angeles County replaces it’s old-style, cable-based freeway call box system with cellular phones. L.A. County was also part of the joint bid, Kenan said, and will soon begin using some cellular phones to serve remote freeways.
L.A. Cellular, majority-owned by McCaw Communications--the largest cellular company in the country--has only half as many subscribers in Southern California as PacTel, according to cellular telephone analyst Herschel Shosteck of Silver Spring, Md. PacTel had an 18-month head start in establishing its system, which is now the largest single cellular network in the country.
