BellSouth Wireless Inc. is prodding other cellular carriers to adopt its Cellemetry wireless telemetry solution by announcing it will only license the technology to one carrier per market-first come, first served.
“We don’t want to get into the `wait-and-see game’ that other wireless data technologies have had to deal with,” said Peter Roach, BellSouth’s director of network access strategy.
Cellemetry operates over the control channel on analog cellular networks. BellSouth said it plans to introduce it commercially in its own regional markets in January. The company intends to license it to other carriers by the end of this year.
Implementation of Cellemetry requires only installing a gateway at the mobile telephone switching office and some programming, Roach said. Therefore, he said it is an excellent revenue-producing service for cellular carriers because it doesn’t require a high density of users to cover infrastructure costs and make economic sense.
Costs for the end-user are negotiated on a contract-by-contract basis and carriers will have flexibility to set their own local pricing, but Roach said BellSouth is “really looking at expanding that market down a level,” from the high-end user now being served by existing data networks to include more price-sensitive market segments. He noted that applications for Cellemetry include vending machines, alarm message transport and automated meter reading.
