Washington Post in Pocket Phone Venture
Washington Post Co. said Wednesday that it has joined with American Personal Communications Inc. to develop a new pocket-sized, wireless telephone service for the Washington area.
Maryland-based AMC is the general partner in the limited partnership, which expects to begin testing an experimental phone system by year-end and be fully operational by the end of 1991, the companies said.
Initially, the system would allow only one-way, outbound calling in Washington and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs, much like pay phones. Such a service is in use in Great Britain.
The companies could jointly invest up to $6 million in the testing phase, Post spokesman Guyon Knight said. He would not speculate on what the overall development cost would be.
The system is one of a number of Federal Communications Commission-sanctioned experiments in “personal communications networks” that proponents hope eventually will replace existing cellular and wired phone systems, particularly in office buildings.
These proponents envision that someday all calls will be made not to locations, but to people, wherever they are, who would carry tiny phones with them.
Wayne N. Schelle, AMC’s chairman, said these new types of wireless phones are expected to be smaller, lighter and cheaper than today’s portable cellular phones.
“Every member of a family or employee of a business will be able to carry a phone in their pocket in the same way they currently carry their keys or wallet,” Schelle said in a statement.
The folding phones, which will resemble a travel alarm clock, may be sold for as little as $75, AMC says.
Customers would be able to make calls whenever they are in range of refrigerator-sized transmitting stations that would link callers with the public phone network or to other users of the wireless system.
The system will use digital “spread spectrum” technology that allows a single call to switch back and forth continually to whatever frequency is available. The low-power radio signals will have ranges of only a few hundred feet, which means they will have less tendency to interfere with each other.
This approach should dramatically increase the capacity--and thus lower the costs--for a personal communications network, compared to today’s cellular systems, which use more power to operate over longer distances on a relatively restricted number of channels. However, the low-power devices do not work well in moving automobiles.
AMC got permission from the FCC earlier this year to test the new phone service for up to 2,000 users, but the FCC hasn’t decided whether to allot precious radio airspace to these new services.
The companies said that if the FCC approves full development of the new service, it will consider expanding to other U.S. cities.
Washington Post Co., whose holdings include the Washington Post newspaper, in 1983 won a cellular phone franchise with AMC for the Washington-Baltimore area. The Post no longer is in that partnership, Knight said.
