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Pure Bollocks Issue 22_019
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* F E A T U R E S *
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The Cellular time bomb ticks on...
The cellular phone business is in crisis, a victim of its own success.
So many people are now signing on to Cellnet and Vodafone services that
in just four and a half years, both have 300,000 subscribers and are gaining
nearly 4000 more each week.
Congestion, with callers unable to get through because all available
frequencies are in use, is so bad that users are likely to latch on to any
journalists they meet and beg them to write stories 'exposing the scandal'
of the high prices charged for such erratic services.
Although Cellnet and Vodafone can produce statistics which 'prove'
that only a small percentage of calls fail, any mention of this proof is
likely to throw anyone sitting in a traffic jam with a blocked line into
paroxysms of rage.
The government has released extra frequencies to ease the problem
and Cellnet and Vodafone continually play technical tricks with their
cells to allow more frequent re-use of available frequencies. But
Cellnet recently suffered catastrophic failures caused by
overloading of Motorola 'switches' which control the allocation of calls
to transmitters.
Cellphone users are reaching the end of their tether, grass roots staff
are worried because they know there is worse to come, and dealers play
ostrich.
With impeccable timing, British Telecom has chosen to replace Cellnet's
battle scarred and respected boss Colin Davis with new man Stafford Taylor -
who has spent his life working for IBM and IBM dealers, and is acknowledged
by BT to have no experience of cellular radio.
Taylor's first job will be to face highly unpalatable facts served up
on his plate by his own engineers and backed by the experience of Vodafone's
engineers. In a nutshell, the national cellular services may well have to
shut their doors to new customers in mid 1991, far earlier than expected.
The more expensive pan European gsm service - previously seen as an
adjunct to the national service for jetsetting business users - will become
the saviour of the national services.
Britain's existing national cellular services use the total access
communications system (tacs). Extra frequencies recently relinquished by
the military are known as extended tacs. Tacs and etacs use analogue
speech.
Gsm carries speech as heavily compressed digital code which is interleaved
to allow one channel to carry at least twice the number of calls on
analogue tacs.
The first gsm prototypes, expected next summer, will use a large
number of discrete components and be expensive. Dedicated microchips will
not be ready until late 1992.
European manufacturers are anxious to keep markets to themselves
and exclude Japanese competitors. So subscribers will have to pay European
prices, whatever they are. And cross border billing will increase call
charges.
All this would not matter if the national services had room for
continued expansion alongside gsm. But they do not.
Each country in Europe was allocated a 25MHz band of radio spectrum
for cellular radio, 15MHz for analogue systems now and 10MHz for digital gsm
in the future.
In Britain Cellnet and Vodafone each have 5MHz for gsm which, with
digital compression and interleaving, will cope with 250,000 subscribers.
Once these channels are congested, gsm can only expand if frequencies
are transferred from existing tacs services.
Until recently, engineers believed that there could be a slow, orderly
transfer of a few frequencies at a time, with all frequencies finally
being transferred by 2010 when the existing tacs operators' licences expire.
But research studies carried out by the tacs operators and now on Taylor's
desk show that the computers controlling gsm will need to work with large
blocks of frequencies transferred from tacs.
Ted Beddoes, Vodafone's technical director, believes the company can
sign on up to 1.5 million subscribers and go on using tacs until at least
1992. Steve Hearndon, his counter part at Cellnet, prefers to work on a
ceiling of one million subscribers, likely to be reached June 1991 when gsm
becomes available.
He warns that taking on more than a million tacs subscribers, especially
if a third are in London, will mean too many people fail to get through.
He describes planning for the future as a 'mental juggling act'.
As one jaded cellular engineer put it:"The trade looks at the next ten
minutes. What they worry about is what discounts they can get now, not what
may happen in 1992. They assume engineers will find answers to everything."
Oftel recognises the problem but says vaguely it has confidence
that new digital personal communications technology, which works at around
2GHz, will save the day.
Cellnet's Hearndon fears that the trade is being distracted by this kind
of talk. "These frequencies are twice those used by cellular phones," he
warns. "The technology is not ready and there are not enough skilled people
in the industry to solve the problems."
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