Cellular Roaming: The New Deals @ Matarese.com

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Cellular Roaming: The New Deals Traveling with a cellular phones gets easier as carriers work together toward a nationwide network By Karen Kleiner How often would you take your cellular phone out of town with you . . . if you knew you could make and receive calls wherever you went? Cellular roaming technology is continually evolving toward this goal. Ultimately, we'll have a seamless communications network that is as extensive as it is simple to access. According to Kevin McKeard, director of intercarrier services at McCaw Cellular, the largest nonwireline carrier in the U.S., "The goal is to have the roamer able to use features as easily as in the home market." For cellular companies, making roaming easy for the customer is a difficult task. To accomplish this task requires new technology and increasingly complex agreements among more and more carriers. Yet, the results of the carriers' efforts appear promising. The FCC divided the United States into 306 Metro Service Areas (MSAs), or urban markets, and 428 Rural Service Areas (RSAs). Today, all MSAs have regular service available. Of the 428 rural markets, approximately 150 now have cellular service. By June 1992, cellular service should be available in all rural markets, enabling the cellular user to roam in any part of the country. The Federal Communications Commission licensed two carriers within each urban or rural market. There's an A carrier (the nonwireline carrier) and a B carrier (the wireline carrier), usually affiliated with the local telephone company. For example, in Los Angeles, the A carrier is L.A. Cellular, a company that deals exclusively in cellular communications, while the B carrier is PacTel Cellular, owned by Pacific Bell, the local landline giant. There are approximately four hundred such cellular companies that hold licenses to the numerous markets throughout the country. You must choose between the A or B carrier when you sign up for service in your home market. However, when you're roaming, you can alternate as you like between the A and B providers in the host service area. Cellular phones have an A/B switch, which allows you to choose between the two. You may want to switch for a variety of reasons. For instance, the alternate carrier may have lower rates, or it may provide a wider coverage area in the city you're traveling through. Also, your carrier (the A carrier) may not have a roaming agreement on the A band in the market you're traveling in, or may have an agreement with the B carrier in that market. When you become a cellular customer, your carrier will give you roaming capability as a standard feature. You must pay for all airtime (as with local cellular use), whether you're making or receiving a call. Rates vary from approximately 50 cents to $1.00 per minute. If you're calling long distance, additional charges are paid either by you or the person you're speaking with. Most cellular companies also charge a roaming rate of $2.00 to $3.00 per day. A few companies, like MetroPhone in Philadelphia, charge no extra daily roaming fee to their subscribers. The procedure for placing an outgoing call varies, depending upon which carrier you're signed up with, which market you're roaming in and the agreements your cellular company has made within that market. Every cellular carrier provides specific information on dialing procedures in its roamer guide, which you can obtain by calling an information number. In a host city, you can call the carrier directly and inquire about roaming procedures. A good additional resource for keeping on top of the market boundaries is The Cellular Telephone Directory, published by Communications Publishing [(800) 366-6731] This reference guide contains maps of all coverage areas. It also includes instructions for sending and receiving calls in all cities, as well as an 800 number for each carrier. Placing Calls as a Roamer When you're away from your home area and able to roam, a roam indicator LCD or verbal display will light up on your phone. Usually, you'll be able to roam automatically, dialing out without any prior arrangements with the host carrier. Many carriers offer special roaming features that truly benefit the customer. For example, "Proactive Roaming," offered by BellSouth Mobility, takes the initiative and calls you when you enter a new market. The service welcomes you to the city and gives general roaming information. "The call is free to the customer," says Joanne Blout, director of strategic market planning for BellSouth, "and we give the customer the option of not being called again when he or she returns to that particular market." Dialing "*711" in most markets will connect you with a roaming information line. The information line generally provides a tutorial on roaming and in some cases uses interactive voice response. Receiving Calls As A Roamer As a rule, if you let callers know when and where you'll be, they can reach you by dialing the roamer port access number in the city you're in, followed by your ten-digit cellular phone number. To expedite the process, you can leave a message on your outgoing voice mail informing callers where you'll be and the roamer port access number to reach you. If the caller chooses to reach you on your mobile phone, he or she pays the long distance phone charge and you pay for the cellular air time. Several services exist that make reaching a roamer easier. One such service, called "Follow Me Roaming" (FMR), provided by GTE Telecommunications, is available primarily through B carriers. Another, Appex Corporation's "Roaming American"--sometimes called "Nationlink"--is available primarily through A carriers. FMR can be accessed in over 300 cities nationwide. You can tell if the city you're roaming in offers it by looking in your roamer guidebook. When you're ready to activate the service, you simply dial "*18" and press SEND. You'll hear a confirming beep tone or message. Then press END. Within fifteen to thirty minutes, callers can reach you simply by dialing your mobile number, without even knowing where you are. Some slight disadvantages to Follow Me Roaming should be pointed out. For instance, when a caller uses FMR to reach you, your account is charged for both cellular airtime and the long distance tolls from the caller's city to the city you're roaming in. Also, when FMR is activated, your voice-mail cannot be used. This means if you're away from the car, on the phone, or your phone is turned off, your calls will not be answered. If you leave a market or wish to deactivate the service while there, you simply dial "*19." At midnight every night, FMR automatically deactivates, so if you want to continue the service, you need to reactivate it the next morning. When you travel to a new market, FMR must be reprogrammed in order for calls to reach you. Similar to FMR, Nationlink allows a caller to reach the roamer simply by dialing that particular phone number. The roamer pays both airtime and long distance charges. Nationlink also provides an option called "Caller Notification," which enables the roamer to save on long distance calls. In this mode, the caller hears a message stating, "The customer you are trying to reach is not in the service area." The message then gives the caller the roamer port number for the city the roamer is in. With this option, the caller, rather than the roamer, pays the long distance charges--if the caller chooses to proceed with the call. Call Delivery A still simpler method of receiving calls is currently available within limited geographic areas: call delivery. This service relies upon a network of computers belonging to different carriers in different markets to communicate and deliver calls. PacTel's call delivery service, "Auto- Access," requires just one activation to be kept on indefinitely while you travel, eliminating the hassle of programming it again the next day, as you would have to with most other roaming plans. PacTel currently offers this service to its subscribers in many cities in California, as well as in Reno, Nevada. It plans to expand the service to other cities, including Las Vegas. Other carriers have similar networks in Florida, the Great Lakes region, the Northeast, the Pacific Northwest and in Canada. McCaw Cellular currently provides a call delivery service in both the Pacific Northwest and Florida. Their "Cellular One" network provides service along all major interstate corridors in Washington, Oregon and British Columbia. By October of this year, it plans to introduce a "seamless network" in which computers from those regions, as well as California and the Northeast, will be linked. By December, McCaw will add Texas and Minnesota. Call delivery will be offered everywhere in the system. Bob Ratliffe, vice president of communications for McCaw Cellular, says that "when McCaw finishes its national network, all home market features will be available for roamers." For example, voice mail that is inoperative when using Follow Me Roaming will be available with call delivery when the network is fully operational. Nationwide Cellular Switchboard The overall goal of the industry, according to Norman Black, director of public affairs and communications for the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), is to provide nationwide automatic call delivery. He believes that if the technology progresses on schedule and Judge Green (the magistrate in charge of the AT&T breakup) issues a waiver, the entire industry will have call delivery in place by the first quarter of 1992. This means that all the computers throughout the country will be able to communicate with each other. All calls will find the correct customers, no matter where they are, and without them having to do anything other than pick up their phones! A national network will have other benefits, as well. Presently, roamers sometimes lose a call while moving to a different market. "Call handoff," available in some regions, prevents this from occurring. The computer passes the call from one system to the next without the roamer hearing any clue of the switch. As different types of carrier computers become compatible with each other, call handoff will be easier to achieve on a national basis. Any custom features that subscribers have in their home market will be transferred and accessible in the market in which they're roaming. With the arrival of a national network, the industry may also find innovative solutions to the problem of cellular fraud, which resulted in $100 million in losses last year alone. For one thing, call validation will become that much simpler for the roamer and more accurate, helping to insure calls are not illegally charged to a user's number. Likewise, computers in the market that the roamer enters will be able to identify customers and know whether their credit is good even before they place their first call. In the future, cellular phone numbers will truly be identified with individual subscribers, regardless of their location. This will be a major step toward what many visionaries see as a new communications age: An era where we will have a go-anywhere personal communications device with us at all times. This pocket-sized unit will retain all the features and simplicity we're used to from our present home landline phones . . . and more.

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