A quarter century ago, RCR’s inaugural issue rolled off the presses.
Radio Communications Report was launched by Titsch Communications Inc. as a monthly spinoff of another publication, Two-Way Radio Dealer, to cover the emerging cellular telecommunications industry. In its second year of publishing, with the industry beginning to heat up, RCR increased its frequency to twice a month. Later, RCR also began publishing cellular and paging handbooks.
RCR began reporting on the nascent cellular industry before the first cellular phone call was made in 1983. Early phones were contained in car trunks, and even the most aggressive forecasts for the industry predicted it would not amount to much more than a niche market.
The headlines in RCR’s earliest days focused on the government’s efforts to get wireless spectrum into the hands of companies that could bring cellular service to market. The Federal Communications Commission had decided on a duopoly system, with one license in each market going to the wireline carrier and one going to a nonwireline carrier. The agency further had decided to award that spectrum via comparative hearings, but so high was the interest in the licenses that the FCC was buried in application paperwork and documentation that some said actually broke shelves. More than 900 applications were submitted for licenses in the top 90 markets, and the process became so bogged down that the FCC urged parties competing for the same licenses in markets to strike settlements with each other.
The award process grew to a virtual standstill as competing applicants wrangled over minute details, and the FCC, in an effort to hasten the award of licenses, in 1984 moved away from comparative hearings to a lottery system. The lottery system solved some problems but created others. The system attracted mailmen, plumbers, accountants and just about anyone else willing to take a risk. Many thousands of applications were submitted for licenses under the lottery scheme, but most applicants never intended to build out networks, instead hoping to sell their licenses to the highest bidder.
All the while, the industry was taking off and by the early 1990s, the cellular industry had grown beyond expectations. Early predictions forecast the cellular market would reach only a few million subscribers by 1995. But the industry reached nearly 100,000 subscribers within just 15 months of its launch, and it reached the 1-million-subscriber mark by 1987. Wireless subscribers numbered nearly 50 million by 1995, and today more than 200 million subscribers use wireless phones in the United States.
Cellular phones had evolved from massive equipment installed in the trunks of cars, to transportable devices contained in bags, to brick phones that at the time were considered small and portable.
RCR was evolving too. In 1992, Crain Communications Inc., which publishes such titles as Advertising Age and Automotive News, bought RCR. The publication also expanded the resources it provided to its subscribers, launching a daily news fax service that delivered breaking news to subscribers’ fax machines each afternoon.
The early 1990s provided many milestone stories for RCR to cover. In 1994, RCR reported on AT&T Corp.’s blockbuster acquisition of nonwireline carrier McCaw Cellular Communications Inc. for $11.5 billion, marking its re-entrance into the wireless industry. After its breakup in 1982, AT&T had relinquished its wireless assets to the Baby Bells, which had diligently expanded their wireless networks and grown their customer bases.
Meanwhile, a nontraditional competitor to cellular was thinking big. Nextel Communications Inc.’s predecessor, Fleet Call Inc., began cobbling together specialized mobile radio licenses during the late 1980s and early 1990s and eventually crafted a digital technology path for its walkie-talkie/cellular service. Nextel became a formidable competitor to cellular with a loyal subscriber base and rare customer-acknowledged technology differentiation.
The pace of the wireless industry never slowed, and in the late 1990s, the industry and RCR continued their evolution.
RCR increased its frequency to weekly in 1996. In 1997, RCR discontinued its news fax service to focus on its newly launched Web site at rcrnews.com, which evolved to include daily and weekly e-mail alerts of the industry’s most important news.
At the same time, the wireless industry was preparing itself for new competitors as the FCC, having scrapped the lottery system, awarded new personal communications services licenses via auction. The auction system solved some of the problems associated with the comparative hearings and lottery process, but also created new problems. Bid-rigging allegations were investigated as were cases of large companies bidding through small businesses to take advantage of bidding credits. In addition, many of the C-block auction winners eventually filed for bankruptcy protection, notably NextWave Telecom Inc., which engaged the FCC in a legal battle over its licenses well into the next decade.
Carriers were evolving their networks from analog to digital, and technology “religious wars” began making headlines, as a scrappy San Diego company called Qualcomm Inc. tried to convince carriers to adopt its CDMA digital technology.
The late 1990s also saw the beginnings of massive consolidation sweeping through the ranks of the Bell companies, in what some likened to the resurrection of Ma Bell, driven by the benefits of scale and national coverage. While carriers were becoming bigger, phones were becoming smaller and could fit into pockets and purses. Handset costs had dropped to the point that cellular phones became a mass-market product.
The factors that drove cellular’s growth, however, hurt the paging industry. By the end of the 1990s, the industry that at one time held great potential for keeping people connected had been all but shut down by cellular’s popularity. The much-hyped mobile satellite industry also sputtered under massive buildout costs and lower-than-expected demand.
By the turn of the century, the wireless industry had grown by leaps and bounds, and RCR launched its Wireless Hall of Fame in 2000 to honor those industry leaders who have influenced the industry the most during its first two-plus decades. To date, RCR has inducted 21 people to its Hall of Fame.
As RCR embarks on its next quarter century of reporting on the wireless industry, many things have changed and some have stayed the same. Technology wars still make headlines; consolidation continues; handsets are still being tweaked to offer more functionality on less real estate; competition among carriers and vendors alike remains intense; and the industry still loves its acronyms.
But even though the industry is maturing, it has not stopped evolving. The industry has moved beyond the voice model, with everything from e-mail to TV being offered on mobile handsets. Wi-Fi hot spots are spreading like wildfire. Mobile virtual network operators are competing in new ways for customers. It should be an interesting next 25 years.
