NEW YORK-As Omnipoint Communications Inc. sprints toward the Nov. 14 commercial launch of its personal communications service in the New York City metropolitan area, two hurdles remain: Nynex and NIMBY.
But when Omnipoint opens for business this week, there will be no disclaimers and no fine print. Its launch will be full-scale, commercial and available to the entire public. Its pricing will be straightforward, a-what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach, with usage plans ranging from $20 to $50 per month.
Its coverage, at first, will be adequate to cover New York City and counties adjacent to it in New Jersey and New York state. By launch date, the company expects to have 140 base stations in service. Next year, it plans to bring the total number of base stations to 566, “mostly for capacity, to handle more than a million customers at a time during the 3 to 6 p.m. peak period,” said George Schmitt, president. A fully deployed system also will let people use their PCS phones deep inside skyscrapers, but not deep into the bowels of the underground subway, he added.
There are, however, two proverbial flies in the ointment.
Given five months’ notice that Omnipoint needs 140 operative base stations by mid-November, Nynex Corp. had supplied T-1 high-speed data lines needed to run just 70 base stations as of Nov. 4, Schmitt said. On Nov. 6, the New York State Public Service Commission levied $46 million in fines against Nynex for poor service. That’s in addition to $16.2 million Nynex already has paid this year and another $10 million in fines it is contesting this year in New York state alone.
Needless to say, the advent of competitive local exchange companies like Teleport Communications Group and MFS Communications, which WorldCom recently acquired, are viewed in a very positive light by Omnipoint officials.
Then there’s NIMBY, the Not-In-My-Backyard syndrome, especially among residents in upper-income sections of Westchester County, which hugs New York City’s northern border. A team of Omnipoint staffers is scouring the county, whose commuter residents stand to gain from PCS, but it’s a tough slog, according to Oscar H. McKee, director of RF engineering. Conrail, the freight railroad, and Con Edison, the electric utility, will ride to the rescue here, Schmitt said.
“I tend to be an optimist. We’re doing a lot better now at getting up sites. They come in waves,” McKee said. “The main arteries into New York City from New Jersey are in good shape,” as are the highway corridors to the three airports.
Meanwhile, everything else is set to go. Some 180,000 Nokia Corp., Ericsson Inc. and Motorola Inc.-brand handsets with retail prices ranging from $200 to $300 have been ordered for the initial deployment of PCS-1900, an upbanded version of the Global System for Mobile communications technology. Retail distribution-Omnipoint’s, as well as discount office supply and department stores, among other outlets-are in place. The company’s Bethlehem, Penn., round-the-clock customer service center, which can handle prepaid calling and real-time billing, is ready to go. Roaming agreements are in place, although an occasional hand-off juncture may require some fine tuning.
And now for the debut in a crowded metropolitan area where dropped calls and bad reception have become the norm for wireless telephone customers.
