An independent Louisiana telephone company is among those launching the second wave of personal communications service systems in the country.
Meretel Communications L.P. has received a multimillion loan from the Rural Telephone Finance Corp. and signed a contract with Lucent Technologies Inc. to supply infrastructure equipment and handsets.
The C-block licensee hopes to have a sizable portion of its Louisiana/Texas PCS network in operation early next year, said John Scanlan, a Meretel board member. The service will cover 1.8 million pops and use Code Division Multiple Access technology.
A- and B-block PCS licensees that chose Global System for Mobile communications technology were able to launch systems this year. Other A- and B-block license holders plan to launch a handful of markets in time for the winter holidays, then further deploy the networks early next year.
Now rural phone companies and other small businesses with C-block licenses are hot on their heels.
Meretel has its five PCS licenses in hand, having successfully fought off protests from a Louisiana cellular operator. Meretel’s PCS network will cover Baton Rouge, Hammond and Lafayette, La., and Beaumont-Port Arthur and Lufkin-Nacogdoches, Texas, just across the Louisiana border. This horizontal footprint covers Interstate 10, which is the arterial highway between Houston, Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
The Meretel partnership is comprised of three owners: Eatel Inc., Mercury Cellular & Paging and Fort Bend Telephone Co. of Fort Bend, Texas.Lake Charles, La.-based Eatel is a 66-year-old independent telephone company that operates local phone service in Ascension and Livingston parishes in Louisiana.
Eatel also sells paging, long-distance service, Internet access and business telephone systems in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Eatel operates a local paging network in those two cities and resells service to fill in wide area service gaps.
“You hear MCI talk about putting things together in one-stop shopping, but we’ve been doing that for several years,” said Scanlan, who also is executive president of Eatel.
Lake Charles-based Mercury Cellular & Paging is the B-side cellular carrier for the metropolitan statistical area of Lake Charles, La. It also operates rural service area 3 and RSA 5 in Louisiana and 15 RSAs in Kansas, Mississippi and Alabama.
Mercury’s cellular footprint covers 1.2 million pops. The Louisiana markets supports Time Division Multiple Access digital service as well as analog-based service.
Mercury also operates a paging network in southwestern Louisiana. Its sister company is rural telephone operator Cameron Telephone Co., with local phone and cable TV customers in southwestern Louisiana.
Meretel will sell airtime at wholesale to Eatel and Mercury, the operating partners. Fort Bend Telephone Co. is an equity partner, along with 5 percent owner Brazoria.
Mercury Cellular is bidding in the current PCS auction on its own behalf.
