Lineperson for the County: Pacific Bell Mobile...
Lineperson for the County: Pacific Bell Mobile Services is planning to hire 300 people in Southern California--ultimately tripling the number of workers here--in connection with its summer launch of PCS wireless phone service in the Southland.
The new jobs--100 each for downtown Los Angeles and Orange County and 50 apiece for the San Fernando Valley and Inland Empire--will mostly be for network engineers, marketing specialists and a sales force to compete against rivals AirTouch and LA Cellular, said Steve Sitton, who himself became a new PacBell Mobile Services employee last week with his appointment to head the regional headquarters here.
The PacBell unit is also scouring the Southland in search of real estate for all those new employees. The only firm location so far is a building just south of downtown Los Angeles, which currently has 50 employees. The regional headquarters in Costa Mesa, with 100 employees, is seeking a larger space to accommodate the new employees. PacBell will also open offices in the San Fernando Valley and the Inland Empire.
On the hardware side, PacBell has finished installing 680 transmission antennas that will provide PCS coverage from Santa Barbara to Las Vegas. An additional 120 fill-in antennas will be erected over the next year. Pacific Bell Mobile Services already offers PCS, or personal communications services, in San Diego, San Francisco and Sacramento.
Sitton, who has worked for PacBell parent SBC Communications for six years, declined to pin down a PCS launch date, other than to say he’s aiming for early summer. PacBell’s all-digital service will use an upgraded version of the GSM standard favored in Europe and Asia.
Sitton previously ran SBC’s Cellular One network in Washington and Baltimore, where he went head to head with the country’s first PCS network, which was launched by Sprint Spectrum in late 1995.
Although he lauded the PCS technology--especially a smart card feature that allows a customer to switch from phone to phone without changing his phone number or losing custom features--Sitton’s own PCS phone went out twice during a 20-minute call between Los Angeles and Orange County.
