Even in this new era of commoditized wireless competition, sometimes it pays to enter the market by trying to set the bar a little higher.
Irvine, Calif.-based Comarco Wireless Technologies Inc. is attempting to do just that with its line of field measurement test equipment.
“We didn’t come in with a market-share play, we started with high-end products for network performance baselining,” said Michael Burdiek, CWT’s vice president and general manager. “Our competitive advantage is a distinct product and capability to truly measure the customer quality experience compared to the generic test measurement that was the norm,” he said.
The strategy has paid off. CWT increased its operating income 91 percent for fiscal year 1996, ended Jan. 31, contributing nearly $4 million to its parent company, defense contractor Comarco Inc.
“We’re a successful startup within an old company,” Burdiek said. “But, there’s no shared resources with the defense business besides financial support. We had some experience with contracts for freeway callboxes and mobile pay phones, so we were able to talk the language to a certain extent and get some carrier feedback to what we were planning. Initially we worked with a major cellular operator on the West Coast to develop our specifications,” he said.
When the company made its major move into wireless in 1991, it found that cellular carriers were already competitive and wanted better management information to help them view their network performance from the customer quality perspective “as if they could report themselves,” Burdiek said.
“Our system was objective. It would tell the truth,” he said.
With the company’s latest product, the Network Evaluation Series Gen II, carriers can emulate customer behavior under actual load conditions and measure network response from the subscriber’s perspective.
Gen II does a comparative baseline test between the customer’s network and the competition’s, which is particularly important with differing air interface standards being deployed in a market, Burdiek noted.
“In the United States, cellular carriers in 59 out of the top 60 markets use our products to continuously drive their systems with comparative baseline testing,” he said.
The company has not sold to any of the emerging personal communications services carriers.
“I like to tell carriers, `The best time to start using this product is as soon as they have the first paying customer.’ For us, the market doubles in ’97 when PCS rolls out,” he said.
