The technology, therefore, allows the use of channels that previously wouldn't have been suitable for mobile telephone communication because the range of reception was limited. The grid system also ensures maximum efficiency on each channel. For these reasons, cellular radio, at least theoretically, provides enough channels to meet pent-up demand.
As the number of subscribers and equipment manufacturers rises, rates should fall substantially. Wayne Schelle, president of American Radio-Telephone Service Inc., a Baltimore-based company that is test-marketing cellular radios to 200 customers, says that trial prices are $45 a month for service, $100 a month for equipment rental, and 40 cents a minute for calls. Eventually, he expects to charge as little as $10 a month for service, $55 to $60 a month for rental, and 25 cents a minute for calls.
William Peterson, president and owner of Professional Sounds Inc., in Fairfax, Va., a company that designs and furnishes equipment and professional audio services, sees himself as an example of the prime prospect for the emerging telecommunications technology -- "the smaller businessman who has to be out hustling and talking to people but still has to be the kingpin of the operation." His user credentials are already impressive: He has one conventional car-installed mobile telephone, tone-voice pagers for each of his company's six employees, one numeric-display pager, and has participated in a test program of a cellular-radio system using American Radio-Telephone's interconnect service.
Peterson considers the $200 a month he pays for his portable phone a good investment. "If I can make just one call and get a piece of business, or if I can service one important client who wants to speak with me now, that's worth $200 a month to me."
The ability to respond quikly to customers has been the strongest motivation for subscribing to mobile-communications services, whether telephones or paging devices. But the new technologies are creating new applications.
Pagers, costing as little as $35 to $45 a month, already spell out messages in letters and numbers (alphanumeric displays), using an LCD screen. In a few more months, the devices will print out copy on paper the size of ticker tape. And perhaps as early as the end of this year, units will have keyboards, allowing them to function as terminals through which users can tap into databases. Eventually, paging companies will offer equipment that enables subscribers to hear, in computer-synthesized speech, messages that their callers have typed using the buttons of their telephone.
"Paging is in an embryonic stage," says MCI's Taylor. Eventually, he envisions pagers "delivering any kind of information that can be broadcast and delivering it anywhere in this country or abroad."
David Post, chairman and chief executive officer of Page America Communications Inc., a New York City-based paging, message, and information network and holder of more than 20 RCC licenses, has forged a merger agreement with Page World Communications Inc., a company involved in joint ventures with RCCs in Western Europe and Israel. Post envisions a world in which data from many sources will be delivered into people's pockets. "Imagine," he says, "that a sales manager finds out from the head of operations at the factory that there has been a production overrun, and the company has to move 12,000 boxes of socks. He goes over to the telex machine and punches in ALL SALES PERSONNEL. . . . "
It didn't happen quite that way for Harry Baltimore, but the scenario was dramatic enough to convince him that he didn't want to do without the PageGram pager he had rented from Page America for a three-month trial. Baltimore, director of operations at CYE Industries Inc., a 30-employee, garment-tag manufacturer in New York, was having lunch in a restaurant when his pager beeped and the display printed out his office telephone number. When he called the office he learned that a potential customer had phoned with a rush request for a job estimate -- the customer needed the figures that afternoon. Baltimore jotted down the details, did some fast calculations and called the client back -- all without moving from the restaurant. CYE got the job, and PageGram gained a convert.
Baltimore had never been too happy with the idea of wearing a beeper, he says. It was the numeric display that finally convinced him to try a pager for $28 a month. "I liked the fact that by printing out telephone numbers the unit gave me immediate access to my messages. With all the paging systems I had seen before, you had to keep checking your office to see who was calling."
Baltimore isn't alone in his initial resistance. Many executives have been conditioned to think of pagers as nothing more than summoning devices -- useful only to surgeons on the 18th hole and service personnel. Motorola Inc., a major equipment manufacturer, is attacking these preconceptions on two fronts. While adding memory and alphanumerics to some of its units, the company is also putting its money on snob appeal in the form of Sensar, a tone pager that is about the size and shape of a ball-point pen. "It looks just like my Mont Blanc," says American Radio-Telephone president Wayne Schelle, who plans to offer the new model to his subscribers for about $300.
Post remains convinced that it will be informational capabilities, rather than cosmetics, that will break down executive resistance. "There's a big difference between being bothered and being fed information," he says. "We'll soon be seeing field-service people using beepers and the salespeople or executives using more advanced models."
That, in fact, is already happening at Exotron, where the unit an employee carries provides a quick reading on that person's level of responsibility. "As an individual reaches a certain standing within the company, we will move him up from a conventional beeper to the telemessage service," says Joseph Grossman, providing what may be a glimpse of the latest trend in corporate status symbols.
