FCC to Launch PCS--But Wait, What <i> Is</i> PCS? : Communications: The latest wireless device is simply a radio frequency and a potential $40-billion market. Here’s a primer.
With the Federal Communications Commission about to unleash a new class of wireless communicators in a marketplace already teeming with pagers, cellular phones and the like, consumers can be forgiven for a little confusion.
The newest animal to join the wireless menagerie is the “personal communications service,” or PCS. Scores of companies are positioning themselves to grab a share of what is expected to become a $40-billion-a-year PCS market.
At its meeting today, the FCC will set ground rules for the PCS market, deciding who can compete for PCS licenses, how licenses will be auctioned next June and how many operators will be allowed to do business in each territory.
The prize will go to the companies that turn this frequency into a set of communications services that consumers will pay to use. The betting now is that PCS will fit in somewhere between the cordless household phone, whose range is limited to 100 feet or so, and standard mobile phones.
But what is PCS? And how does it differ from all the other wireless choices facing harried callers?
For the phone-flummoxed, here’s a primer on the great variety of no-wires communications services that are--or will soon be--available.
PCS, first of all, isn’t so much a service as a range of radio frequencies in search of commercial exploitation. These frequencies can be used to send verbal communication as well as data between two points.
But because PCS devices will operate at a higher frequency than cellular phones, they will have less power. Thus, PCS is likely to work only within relatively small areas.
In early experiments--there have been 150 so far--PCS devices have been used as pocket phones for nurses, doctors, janitors and security guards, among other workers who are on the go within a confined campus.
In other tests, PCS antennas have been installed in office buildings to power cordless desktop phones, eliminating the cost of wiring. In still other early uses, PCS phones have served as outgoing-call-only devices for roadside and urban emergencies.
Eventually, it is hoped, similar networks will permit PCS users the same kind of go-anywhere communications.
Evidence so far shows that customers are willing to spend the $25 to $45 a month for new wireless phone service, roughly half what cellular subscribers now spend.
Once PCS catches on, cellular phone service is likely to appeal primarily to consumers who spend a lot of time traveling locally or across the nation.
Cellular is now the only game in town, and you pay a premium for its power, range and exclusivity. But it will soon have competition from something called specialty mobile radio, or SMR.
Taxicabs, ambulances, police cars and corporate service fleets would be lost without their hand radios, which use SMR frequencies.
SMR provides dispatch services between a home base and a roving fleet. Traditionally, vehicles within the fleet communicate only with the base station and not with each other.
Until recently, the consumer potential of SMR had been overlooked. But several years ago, a group of entrepreneurs formed a company, now known as NexTel, to create a cellular-copycat service using SMR frequencies. NexTel service will debut in Los Angeles this year and expand into New York and Chicago next year.
Though virtually identical to cellular service, NexTel is likely to appeal mainly to business fleets looking to improve dispatch operations.
Traditional cellular phones will not work on the NexTel network.
Meanwhile, the cheapest wireless communications are offered by pagers, which can summon or alert you but mostly can’t be used to call back--at least not yet.
But that should change sometime next year when a two-way satellite paging system begins operating. This service will let people receive--and send--brief text messages anywhere on the globe.
