“This is not a race,” said AirTouch Communications Inc. about its controlled rollout of digital cellular service in northern Los Angeles.
“It’s about getting the right customers transitioned,” explains AirTouch spokeswoman Amy Damianakes.
The “right” customers, to the California-based cellular operator, are the heavy phone users that rack up a great deal of airtime. They are the first ones AirTouch wants to move off its busy analog network and onto the new Code Division Multiple Access network it has built.
AirTouch switched a group of its high-use customers to the new CDMA system on May 15. The customers are paying for service, at a price comparable to high-end analog, AirTouch says.
But customers aren’t purchasing the portable phone; it is bundled into the deal as an incentive, the company said. The two dual mode CDMA/analog handsets used by AirTouch for this launch are manufactured by Oki telecom and the Sony/Qualcomm partnership.
AirTouch has installed about 200 CDMA cell sites in a 3,500-square-mile area from the San Fernando Valley west to Ventura. The system covers more than 2.2 million people.
“By itself, the area would be the 18th largest market in the United States, larger than the Denver or Pittsburgh markets in terms of population,” said Lee Cox, AirTouch president and chief executive officer.
The CDMA network was installed last year, but AirTouch has spent more than eight months fiddling with the brand new technology,
“We’ve tested PowerBand service more thoroughly than any other technology we’ve introduced,” said Craig Farrill, AirTouch vice president of technology. “Coverage, depth and breadth have improved, there is undetectable handoff, low power operation and a need for a minimum of spectrum clearing.”
Motorola Inc. built a CDMA cellular system in Hong Kong in 1994; it was not launched until last September, after Motorola Inc. and Hutchison Telecom engineers had tested the operation for nine months.
Farrill said AirTouch co-located all CDMA cells. “We installed CDMA equipment alongside analog equipment, benefiting right away from existing switching centers and minimizing our capital investment.
“CDMA gives superior coverage while equipping less than half our cell sites with digital equipment,” Farrill said last week, and added the company still expects CDMA will provide six to 10 times the capacity of analog.
The Hong Kong deployment was a wide-spread commercial offering accompanied by strenuous advertising. But AirTouch’s stated strategy for the last year has been to first migrate high users, not launch a mass campaign.
All customers will be recruited from within its customer base; AirTouch won’t launch an advertising campaign or say exactly what prices will be charged. “New technology is a fickle thing,” said John Bensche, wireless analyst for CS First Boston. “If you look at the trouble Mtel has had trying to bring new technology to market, you can see this is prudent of AirTouch.”
Mobile Telecommunication Technologies Corp. launched the nation’s first two-way paging system in 1,300 cities last September. The operation has reportedly been plagued with difficulties on its way up the learning curve.
The AirTouch CDMA offering is branded PowerBand. Service will be expanded to about 80 percent of Los Angeles by year’s end, with the last 20 percent slated for completion by March 1997, officials said.
AirTouch said they have an adequate supply of handsets. The Oki CD3000 phone has an 8 kilobit vocoder. The Sony/Qualcomm phone is variable and can work at either 8 kilobit or 13 kilobit, which promoters say provides higher voice quality. CDMA network intelligence in the base station controller and phone determines which kilobit protocol is used, engineers say. Oki plans to introduce a variable 8 kilobit-13 kilobit handset in December.
Moving heavy airtime users to the CDMA system will free space on the analog network, onto which AirTouch hopes to load the consumer customers it is targeting with its TalkAlong brand.
