By focusing on technology strengths and weaknesses, industry veteran Kevin Reynolds believes his newly created consulting firm-PCS Maze Inc.-can safely guide a company through the technical labyrinth that causes so many to lose their way.
Reynolds has a long history in the communications industry. He began his carrier in defense communications for both the government and private sector for about six years. Reynolds then went to work for equipment vendor Ericsson Inc. for three years, followed by more than two years at MCI Communications Corp. Most recently, he was director of technology planning at Paging Network Inc.
After his resignation in October, Reynolds became the senior consultant and president of Maze to complete his tour of the industry-from vendor, to operator, to consultant.
“I focus on … creating marketing models that compare technical limitations with opportunities,” he continued. “I am very focused on new product development. Developing technical-business `what if’ models could be called my `niche.’ This is why I named my company Maze. I walk a customer through the difficult maze of marketing and technical trade-offs.”
It is his long history in the field that allows him to be in this position, he explained. Reynolds said he is experienced with several digital wireless technologies and has filed more than a dozen sole-inventor patents in the last five years for satellite, cellular, paging and wireless data solutions. He holds two engineering degrees as well as a Masters Degree in international marketing.
“I am focused on a unique role, merging technical and business product planning-posing the right questions from an operator’s and manufacturer’s insights,” he said. “This perspective allows companies to create money-making services and tiers of additional features. Asking the right technical and marketing questions before the service is launched can create additional features as well as avoid costly mistakes.”
In general, Reynolds believes the future of wireless is in providing devices that have the potential to offer various types of services, even if not all such services are offered initially. “I would focus on the device first and work backwards from there,” he said. “Can the device provide multiple services?”
For instance, narrowband PCS vendors will succeed by “creating tiers of services and the protocols to allow operators to choose the services they want to deploy and then add others,” he said. “A steady growth of money-making service tiers, placed on good coverage, is the only way to perform in the wireless industry. Subscribers expect messaging, voice and data services from a single device.”
Reynolds believes the abandoned personal Air Communications Technology paging protocol had the right idea in that it incorporated cell level reuse and used an agile device capable of providing many services.
“The narrowband PCS industry should review their pACT notes,” he said. “A tiered service group for a single device offers scalable economies to the operator, vendor and allows a subscriber to painlessly add services as desired.”
Since pACT was abandoned, he said ReFLEX 25 has filled this need and is a step in the right direction. As long as the NPCS industry understands its technological limitations when competing with PCS providers, the industry will survive, Reynolds noted.
“If the approach is right and the economics are right, there is growth for both,” he said. The right approach for paging services today is in acknowledgement paging. “It’s the mid-tier that I’d like to see in the narrowband industry.”
He said another area of growth will be quick delivery data services, such as the growth in personal computers and palmtop personal digital assistants (PDAs). “Very low message latency allowing a subscriber to access a computer network will become an important criteria for the wireless operators of the future.”
