NEW YORK-Teletrac Inc., which uses a paging-based system to locate stolen vehicles, is poised for a fall foray geared to consumers and companies in six metropolitan markets on the West Coast, in the South, the Southwest and the Midwest.
Until January, Teletrac was AirTouch Teletrac, an eight-year-old subsidiary of AirTouch Communications Inc., San Francisco. During its lifetime as an AirTouch subsidiary, the company specialized in developing and marketing wireless remote fleet management, two-way data communications and security technology-primarily for commercial vehicles but also, to a lesser extent, consumer automotive vehicles.
Teletrac reported 46,000 Teletrac units in service in July, of which 13,000 were being used on automobiles belonging to individuals. Virtually all of the private car owners who are Teletrac customers are located in the Los Angeles and Miami metropolitan areas. A big part of Teletrac’s autumnal marketing push will be targeted at individuals-not only in Southern California and south Florida, but also in Chicago, Detroit, Dallas and Houston, where the original company already was active in the commercial fleet management arena. In the Los Angeles area, installing a Teletrac system on a private automobile costs approximately $600-$700, and the monthly service fee ranges from $9 to $15.
“We’re closing on a private placement equity offering through Lehman Brothers (Inc., New York) to finance expansion into New York, San Francisco and seven other cities next year,” said James A. Queen, chairman and chief executive officer of Teletrac, headquartered in Leawood, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City.
Lojack Corp., a major competitor of Teletrac that is based in Dedham, Mass., also offers service in Southern California, south Florida, Illinois, including Chicago, the lower half of Michigan and the New York City metropolitan area. Additionally, Lojack networks cover Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, portions of Georgia including Atlanta, the District of Columbia and its Virginia suburbs, and Rhode Island.
Lojack’s system is a radio transmitter placed at a random location inside a vehicle. Once a car owner reports theft of his vehicle to police, they activate the Lojack, which then broadcasts a silent, coded signal that police can follow to locate the automobile.
Teletrac is a two-way, alphanumeric pager coupled to a vehicle’s theft alarm system. If the car ignition is hot-wired, the Teletrac pager automatically signals Teletrac base station personnel, who are on duty around the clock daily. While alerting either police or the vehicle owner, depending on the arrangement, Teletrac staff follow the movements of the automotive vehicle to within 150 feet of its location at any given time.
Both systems today are limited in their geographic coverage. Queen said Teletrac intends to continually expand its footprint to permit nationwide roaming coverage. However, he added, most thieves steal vehicles in metropolitan areas and take their booty to chop shops in the inner cities.
Although both companies are exploring the possibility of using satellite links to expand roaming capabilities, Queen and Aileen Stein, a Lojack spokesman, said that option probably is at least several years away. “We may indeed like to couple with GPS; Global Positioning Systems are a great bridge, but they fall about three feet short of the shore and they require line-of-site, not unlike Direct Broadcast Satellite television,” Queen said.
Queen heads the management team that acquired all assets of AirTouch Teletrac in a private, all-cash transaction, financed with venture capital by backers that include: Toronto Dominion Bank, Kingdom Capital, Eos Partners and Burr, Egan, Deleage & Co. The assets acquired include exclusive rights to the proprietary technology developed by AirTouch Teletrac.
Additionally, the acquisition comprised complete ownership of licenses for 6 megahertz on the Location Monitoring Services band of the 900 MHz spectrum in the 25 major metropolitan markets of the United States. Future licenses for expansion within those markets, or into other markets, will require competitive bidding at Federal Communications Commission auctions, Queen said. However, Teletrac has the advantage of being grandfathered in for those licenses it already owns.
