COLUMN ONE : THE FUTURE : No Cords, No Wires, No Limits : Expecting a call? Before long, you won’t need to stick by the telephone; it will stick by you--almost anywhere in the world.

They started as status symbols of the rich and powerful, expensive high-tech telephones for those who longed to do business or chat with their friends while trapped on a crowded freeway. Now, some seven years after they hit the airwaves, cellular telephones are proving to be more than mere gadgets for those in the fast lane.

Far more.

Over the next decade, experts predict, wireless personal communication devices--as cellular phones are now called--will become commonplace and will give their owners portable, global communication capabilities reminiscent of Dick Tracy’s, James Bond’s--even Maxwell Smart’s.

Much like Tracy, who wore a two-way radio phone on his wrist, and Smart, whose shoe converted to a telephone, many of us will soon be carrying phones on our belts, in our pockets and purses, even in notebook-size computers.

And just as Bond often used hidden transmitters to trace his foes, we will be able to track phone-toting friends and business associates on an intelligent telephone network, a kind of super-duper call-forwarding system that can locate another one of these new-style phones almost anywhere in the civilized world.

“What the personal computer brought to the masses in the 1980s is what personal communications is going to bring in the 1990s,” says Steve Sazegari, a telecommunications analyst with Dataquest, a Silicon Valley technology-marketing research firm. “By the end of the decade, we are going to be able to get access to services, information and routine conversation regardless of our location.”

The social and business implications of this pending explosion are as far-ranging as those brought by the personal computer.

Customers will be offered new levels of convenience and access, all translating into increased opportunities to converse with friends and business associates. Stuck in line at a theater? Call your mother and earn some good will. Waiting for a call? You won’t need to stick by the phone; it will stick by you.

The down side, however, is the very real possibility that this constant access will prove privacy invading, intrusive, an unwanted tether to home or office.

Nevertheless, businesses and entrepreneurs of every stripe are scrambling to take advantage of the money-making opportunities the new technologies and services will bring. Researchers estimate that telecommunications revenues, now running about $140 billion annually and growing nearly three times faster than the population, will further explode in coming years.

Says Greg Sawers, who tracks the phone industry for the New York investment firm of Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.: “Telecommunications will be the best business opportunity of the next decade, period.”

Early pieces of this scenario are already falling into place.

In just the last six months, several key events have occurred. Motorola introduced a pocket-size cellular phone that weighs a mere 10 ounces. Motorola and International Business Machines announced plans for a radio network connecting specially equipped personal computers. McCaw Cellular Communications, the nation’s largest cellular service, launched an ambitious wireless communication network that will give cellular customers, now tied to a specific region, access to the radio waves almost anywhere in the country.

By the end of the decade, experts say, these and many more developments yet to come will be combined with existing cellular, paging and conventional telephone systems to allow communication by voice, facsimile or computer data stream with anyone, from virtually anywhere.

“The need for coherent information instantaneously is becoming a strong societal demand,” said Sam Ginn, chairman and chief executive of Pacific Telesis, which provides local wired telephone service in California and is a growing player in cellular communications worldwide. “And this is especially true for people who are on the move.”

The keys to these emerging services are radio waves and a host of emerging technologies that can cram and track increasing numbers of conversations and other transmissions into these finite bands of sound. Cellular service, as it is now configured, is just the initial step.

When the current generation of cellular service made its debut in Chicago in late 1983, just weeks before the break-up of American Telephone & Telegraph, few could have predicted the promising future ahead for portable communications.

Certainly the past woefully inadequate and overloaded mobile phone system offered few indications. Even AT&T;, whose own Bell Laboratories invented cellular technology in the late 1940s and refined it 15 years later, didn’t see a ready market for its breakthrough creation.

But by mid-1984, when service was begun in Los Angeles in time for the Summer Olympics, it quickly became obvious that portable communications was an idea whose time had come. Within six months of service inauguration in Los Angeles, the system had attracted about 15,000 subscribers, nearly twice initial estimates.

In the years since, thanks largely to expanding service capacities and rapidly dropping equipment prices, the number of cellular subscribers has grown to more than 3 million in the United States and 4 million worldwide. Los Angeles, with nearly 260,000 subscribers, remains the largest market.

But in markets such as Los Angeles, the limits of the currently available technology are being sorely tested. In some parts of the basin, particularly West Los Angeles and Santa Monica, the immense popularity of cellular service has led to overloaded circuits and temporary interruptions.

All-digital networks provide an alternative. These networks, one to be introduced in Southern California within the next 18 to 24 months, will ease the congestion by more than quadrupling the system’s capacity. Digital networks use simpler signals with less distortion than current systems, thus allowing more communication over the same radio frequencies.

More importantly, digital systems offer the foundation for a host of other technologies and services.

Among the first to emerge is one dubbed CT-2, the second generation of the cordless telephone. This technology is being tested in England as a system of cordless, pay public telephones. People carry them in their pockets or purses and use them when in the vicinity of a relay station, which the English call a Telepoint.

CT-2 technology has its limits. A relay station can serve a relatively small area; in England the system is set to accommodate a radius of about 1,000 feet. And calls cannot be transferred from one station to the next, as cellular calls are handed off to the next cell station. This means that callers must stay put. Further, for the time being, the British Telepoint system relays only outgoing calls from handsets. It does not accept incoming calls, so you can call someone but he can’t call you back.

Millicom Inc. has proposed to operate a similar system in New York City and is awaiting a decision from the Federal Communications Commission on whether to grant the company use of certain radio frequencies there.

Although these systems are outdoor public networks, the same technology can be easily adapted to offices, and should prove especially useful in organizations where workers are frequently on the go or where they are regularly shifted from desk to desk.

With indoor use of CT-2, relay stations could be set up throughout a company’s office complex. Mobile workers and others without permanent desks could carry phones in their pockets or on their belts and use them as they would a cordless phone in the home. Desk phones at these companies would look just like regular office phones now, with one glaring difference: They would be cordless. So if you were forced to move, you would simply pick up your phone along with the rest of your belongings and set up elsewhere. No new wiring needed.

This type of service should be available shortly. Earlier this month, General Cellular Corp., which serves some sections of the United States, unveiled a 100-pound relay station that is the size of a suitcase and operates on regular electrical current. The San Francisco-based company said the device, priced at about $15,000, will be tested later this year in office complexes.

Farther out on the horizon are what have been called personal communications networks--wireless transmission systems pre-programmed with “intelligence” about the likely whereabouts of each subscriber.

“It’s a super-duper call-forwarding system, and it will ultimately do what an ultra-smart secretary already does: Find you and filter your calls,” says Herschel Shosteck, a telecommunications market researcher in Silver Spring, Md. “Sure, it’s a vision, but it’s a vision of what the telecommunications world will begin to look like in just three to five years.”

The network is built on the premise that each customer has a personal telephone number that travels with him and rings him regardless of his whereabouts. This is a substantial departure from the fundamental limitations of present telephone networks, which tie a phone number to a location, such as home, office or car.

Call-forwarding, which allows subscribers to program their phones to pass a call to another number, has eased somewhat the limitations of the current system. But the personal communications network goes even further because it treats an incoming phone call as a page for a specific individual, and then searches the likely hangouts--home, office, car or wherever--of that person.

Further, experts predict, such a service may screen incoming calls according to who is calling. For example, if you didn’t want to talk to your boss or spouse, you could instruct the network to filter out calls from their personal communications identification numbers.

What will make such systems and services possible, analysts explain, are ever-increasing integration and connections among the various telecommunications operators and the expanding vision of conventional wire-line carriers such as AT&T; and the regional Bell operating companies.

AT&T;, which initially ignored cellular service as a meaningless communication sidelight, now says it is entering the business as fast and aggressively as it can. “We originally thought that it was an interesting little business, but that it was never going to be a big deal,” said Richard B. Snyder, director of AT&T;’s cellular system business unit. “We were dead wrong.”

Like other cellular providers, particularly the regional Bell companies such as Pacific Telesis and BellSouth, AT&T; is trying to win cellular franchises internationally, to become a greater part of the emerging worldwide networks that will link wired and wireless communication services.

Already, McCaw Cellular, an aggressive service provider based near Seattle, is trying to offer the wireless domestic equivalent of AT&T;’s vast wired network.

Chairman and Chief Executive Craig McCaw says that his vision is to link McCaw’s own cellular franchises with cellular affiliates in adjacent regions it does not serve directly. The result would be a network that allows a customer to use the same cellular telephone anywhere in the nation and, more importantly, to be accessible to others anywhere.

As companies and providers scramble to take advantage of the emerging opportunities, turf battles are inevitable. But analysts argue that ultimately, there is room for a variety of telecommunication services, both wireless and over conventional telephone wires.

“It’s completely specious to look at these technologies as competing with each other,” Shosteck said. “In the beginning there will be harsh words and political battles, but ultimately, we will see that the services enhance and feed off each other.

“And the type of phone we will use will depend on where we are, and what we want to do.”