Regional Bell operating company U S West Communications Group said it hopes to bundle wireless services along with its local exchange service by 1997.
The company is bidding for several licenses in the Federal Communications Commission’s D-, E- and F-block auction of personal communications services spectrum.
The company decided about one year ago to offer wireless services, said Corey Ford, vice president of development and external affairs for U S West Wireless Group. “It became apparent that our competitors were going to offer packaged bundles of goods and services to a customer base that would include wireless services. We want to meet customers’ needs by offering a product that would be integrated into a number of respects with our wired local exchange service.”
The majority of markets the Denver-based company is bidding for are inside U S West’s 14-state region. About a dozen are outside that region. At RCR press time, the company was the top bidder in about 50 markets.
Ford said almost every Bell company eventually will offer wireless services in some sort of bundled package.
“The way the industry is going, we’re going to see all the vertical types of integration. They (customers) want one-stop shopping,” said Ford.
Other Bell companies already have their own cellular businesses that will allow them to combine services, said Ford. U S West Cellular, which adopted AirTouch Cellular’s moniker in May, is merging with AirTouch Communications Inc. later this year. Since the cellular business is no longer called U S West Cellular, U S West Communications cannot share those services, said Ford.
“We’ll be separate from U S West Cellular. The network will be managed and financed by U S West Communications,” said Ford.
Although the company’s service plans are contingent upon what licenses it purchases, some of the services the company plans to offer include voice telephony, wireless data, paging and in-building wireless. The company has committed to Code Division Multiple Access technology and is involved in vendor negotiations. Some of the networks should be up by 1997, said Ford.
U S West Communications will have to contend not only with the incumbent cellular carriers in each market, but the flood of other PCS providers that also are coming on the scene. Ford said the company will be competing directly with wireless providers for certain segments of customers, but there is “still a great deal of penetration we want to attract. More customers will be able to purchase PCS type services … We will also pursue the business segment. There are lots of things that businesses are interested in with respect to wireless, such as good in-building coverage.”
Offering wireless local loop services also is an attractive option for the company.
“We see wireless local loop becoming an economic reality over the next few years,” said Ford. “There will be limited applications over the next year or so …. Certainly in new (housing) developments and hard to serve rural areas, wireless local loop is a very useful tool.”
