The success of the personal communications services industry has astounded industry analysts, PCS company executives and cellular carriers alike.The PCS industry is about two years old and already has penetrated the market, driven down prices and earned high revenues faster than anyone had expected."It's...
The personal communications services industry emerged almost unscathed in its quest for automatic roaming agreements with analog cellular carriers.Last year's lawsuit, which subsequently was dropped, brought by AT&T Wireless Services Inc. against Southwestco Wireless L.P. over in-market roaming, was thought to be a clash...
LONDON-U.K. mobile operator Orange plc introduced the Orange Network Performance Promise, which offers to automatically credit the company's Talk Plan customers with up to a minute of free talk time for any call that is dropped by the network.As long as the customer calls...
Analysts are indicating now is the time to buy some cheap Canadian wireless stocks, as the mobile phone market finally has rebounded from its 1997 growth slump.BT Alex.Brown Inc. expects Canada's mobile phone companies to add a total of 210,000 new subscribers during the...
ATLANTA-LHS Group Inc. announced it won a multi-million-dollar contract from Portuguese telecom consortium Optimus to provide its billing and customer-care solution called BSCS, or Business Support and Control System.Optimus, formerly known as Main Road, is the new third mobile network operator in Portugal, and...
NEW YORK-A Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association group is developing recommendations for handset manufacturers that would reduce fraud potential and facilitate over-the-air customer activations for non-Global System for Mobile Communications carriers.The CTIA Fraud Technology Assessment Group, charged with evaluating and recommending new fraud-prevention measures, has...
Global System for Mobile communications operators in Europe soon could face a formidable opponent for commercial business accounts if Canada's Telesystem International Wireless Inc. follows through with its plans.The company has emerged not only as the dominant specialized mobile radio service provider in Europe,...
Italian telecommunications operator Telecom Italia has abandoned its plans to buy minority interests in certain global holdings of Cable & Wireless plc, the companies confirmed last week.The two have been working for three months to create a global alliance to exploit what they called...
QualcommQualcomm Inc. announced its shipment of samples for its fifth-generation chipset, including the MSM3000 single-chip Mobile Station Modem and the IFT3000 and IFR3000 fully integrated Intermediate Frequency chipset. The new low-power chipset and software solution enables design of small form-factor handsets with very long...
Though most are based on some form of wideband Code Division Multiple Access technology, the proposals submitted to the International Telecommunication Union last month suggest a tough road toward achieving the family of systems concept to allow for global roaming, let alone convergence of...
With the lifespan of paging devices getting ever shorter, and with new advanced paging devices flooding the marketplace, paging carriers must be extra careful in their purchasing patterns.Kevin Reynolds, president and founder of PCS Maze Inc.-a wireless industry consulting service based in Texas-said the...
Formed to take advantage of the current round of consolidation in the paging industry, a fairly new company announced its first purchase-the paging assets and operations of Bell Atlantic Corp.The New Jersey-based company has not yet come up with a name under which it...
SUNNYVALE, Calif.-Conductus Inc. entered into an agreement to provide a cellular operator in Japan with a Japanese version of its ClearSite product to examine cellular coverage and radio-frequency interference."We are very excited to be working with a company that is one of the largest...
NEW YORK-Citing "the weak state of the new issues public market," Orbcomm Corp., Herndon, Va., announced July 2 it decided to postpone indefinitely its planned initial public offering of 7.6 million shares of stock at $15 to $18 each.The corporate stakeholders of the low-earth-orbit...
Now that the nation's top wireless carrier and its second-largest cable TV company have announced plans to merge, industry watchers are speculating about how the companies might converge their networks.Dan Youmans, a spokesman for AT&T Wireless Services Inc., said it is too soon to...
DALLAS-Panafon, a mobile operator in Greece, awarded Aethos Communication Systems a $1.6 million contract to increase capacity of its prepaid platform to accommodate 300,000 subscribers.This is the second upgrade in nine months for Panafon, said Aethos.
OXFORD, United Kingdom-Investment in the telecommunications sector is an urgent priority for Central and Eastern European countries. Financial management consultant Price Waterhouse examined in a recent report the challenges of such investments for 12 countries in the region, representing a combined population of some...
WASHINGTON-Mexico will receive US$1.06 billion, plus value-added tax, for Personal Communications Services (PCS) and Wireless Local Loop (WLL) spectrum auctioned in a six-month process completed 8 May.The Sistemas Profesionales de Comunicacion (SPC) consortium, Qualcomm Inc. with consortium partner Grupo Pegaso, cellular operator Radio Movil...
TOKYO-IDO, a cellular operator covering the Kanto and Chubu regions of Japan, will market a 69-gram cellular terminal starting in mid-July, the company announced recently. While this is just the latest in a succession of increasingly lighter handsets sold in the Japanese market, what...
BrazilBrazilian B-band operator Americel will deploy Northern Telecom Ltd.'s (Nortel's) Small Wireless Switch to fulfill its concession obligation of serving all state capitals in its coverage area within one year of operation.BCP S/A, Brazilian B-band operator for the metro region of S
OXFORD, United Kingdom-Originally scheduled for fall 1996, Italy's third GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) license finally was awarded in June. The winning WIND consortium is 51-percent owned by the state-controlled electricity utility Enel, together with partners Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom. WIND recently...
DUBLIN, Ireland-Contrary to most industry predictions, Meteor Mobile Communications has secured the third mobile license in the Republic of Ireland.Orange plc of the United Kingdom strongly was fancied to secure the country's first combined GSM 900 license.The Meteor consortium is 60-percent owned by U.S.-based...
"If we delivered the same quality as in the U.K. or Germany, we would have zero subscribers in two weeks," said Hakan Uzan, chief executive officer of Turkey's second GSM network operator, Telsim.Speaking in Istanbul at the recent announcement of a US$500 million infrastructure...
BANGKOK, Thailand-The Asian financial crisis is imposing a brutal shakeout on the Thai telecommunications sector, turning Darwin's law about the survival of the fittest into an apt description of the future state of the industry here.With the nation's economic turmoil entering its second year...
