The Importance of Cellular Communications
Today's rapidly changing business environment is creating intense competition among corporations. Markets are changing faster now than in any other time in history. Product life cycles are shortening and businesses must compete globally (Wheelwrite & Clark, 1992). Employees are required to spend more time with their external and internal customers in order to increase the competitiveness of their organizations. As a result, employees are often away from their phones. Approximately 48 Million employees spend over 20% of the workday away from their desks, and this number is likely to grow (DeBelina, 1995). Telecommunications analysts predict that the existing global wireless telecommunications market is expected to grow from 40 billion dollars in 1993 to 200 billion by the year 2000 (Cauley, 1995). Today's market conditions therefore require that managers evaluate cellular technology as an alternative to traditional wireline telecommunications services to make their corporations more competitive. Since today's cellular network coverage reaches about 95% of the population (Gareiss, 1995), cellular service is a ubiquitous method of providing wireless service to employees on the move. Whether the employees are field engineers accessing databases, ordering products, and retrieving technical specifications or off-site sales staff responding to customer inquiries, deploying cellular technology will increase an organization's responsiveness making it more competitive.
Cellular Background
Cellular networks consist of cellular base stations, mobile telephone switching offices (MTSO), and mobile communication devices. Each base station contains a radio transceiver and controller and provides radio communication to the mobile units located in its cell. The cells are arranged in a honeycomb pattern in order to provide local, regional, or national cellular coverage. The MTSO links calls together using traditional copper, fiber optic, or microwave technology and acts as a central office exchange allowing users to place a call on the local and long distance public telephone systems. It also allows mobile communication devices in the cell to dial out and alerts devices in the cell of incoming calls. The MTSO continuously monitors the quality of the communications signal and transfers the call to another base station which is better suited to provide communication to the mobile device.
The mobile communication devices consist of hand-held phones, car phones, notebook computers, personal digital assistants, pen-based computers, palm-top computers, and portable data collection devices. Since only two percent of the cellular traffic is data, the most popular mobile units are cellular telephones (Gareiss, 1995). When these mobile units communicate to the network, they must register with the system by subscribing to a carrier service. Most carrier services have arrangements with other providers allowing users to roam. Roaming occurs when the mobile unit is outside the coverage of their cellular service provider and an alternative cellular provider places the call.
Cellular Features and Applications
Cellular technology extends the bounds of a corporation's existing telecommunications infrastructure by connecting mobile units to the public network operated by the local exchange or long distance carriers. The cellular users have special features and functions specific to cellular customers but they can also use the features and functions of the public phone systems. This allows cellular technology to be flexible enough to take advantage of features and functions of almost any public or private network.
Cellular product offerings have many features, functions, and prices which make cellular technology ideal for many business applications. For less than sixty dollars a month, users can take advantage of the "anywhere-anytime" capabilities of cellular service. Cellular providers also have a variety of local, regional or national coverage plans that may be tailored to a specific set of business requirements. Cellular companies are designing products that fulfill a special set of application requirements for different industries. This is know as vertical applications. For example, the Motorola Corporation, one of the largest cellular equipment providers, creates products for field service and logistics, corporate application extensions, mobile offices, and personal communications (DeBelina, 1995). There are numerous other uses for cellular equipment in the public, private and business sectors. Professionals such as reporters, lawyers, real estate and sales professionals, portfolio managers and even farmers are using cellular equipment to relay information where time is of the essence (Donovan, 1995a; Mehta, 1995; Mello, 1995). Airlines, train services, livery services and other transportation organizations are also using cellular communication to improve the quality of their services (Mason, 1995). Additionally, the military, the police, and emergency medical services are using cellular communications to improve operations in life threatening situations (e.g., Mello, 1995; Donovan, 1995b; Mehta, 1995; Bernstein, 1995). The use of cellular communications can save time, cut costs, improve service, and allow for convenience and mobility. Therefore, managers must evaluate its use in their organizations, familiarize themselves with vertical applications designed for their industries, and know how their competitors are using the technology to gain a competitive advantage.
Cellular State of the Art and Future
The state of the art cellular communications networks are not actually cellular networks themselves, but the next generation of wireless networks. This new generation of wireless networks are called Personal Communication Services (PCS). The PCS is a wireless communications network which operates different radio frequencies that have a greater capacity for carrying voice and data traffic. Currently, a cellular mobile unit's throughput peaks at 14.4 K bps (Gareiss, 1995) where current PCS systems using the personal access communications services (PACS) standard have channel throughput of 384 K bps with an upside potential of 25 M bps (Raychaudguri, 1995). PCS allows greater data throughput over the air links whereas the existing cellular infrastructure is insufficient to carry the growth of bandwidth intensive applications (Colmenares, 1994; Tang & Sobol, 1995; Kobb, 1993). Therefore, PCS is well positioned to handle the bandwidth intensive applications of the future.
PCS will be less expensive than cellular communication because of government regulation promoting and increasing competition (Bernier, 1995). Government regulators will affect competition by assigning each major trading area (MTA) with five PCS providers compared to the traditional two cellular providers in each MTA. Additionally, cellular providers will not be permitted to provide PCS service in areas where they provide cellular service (Novak, 1995). Some members of Congress are trying to remove the restrictions that prevent cellular carriers from owning and operating PCS networks in areas they provide cellular service because they believe these restrictions "will impede the development of PCS." (Congressional Record, 1993). This author believes PCS will capture the growth of new subscribers and cut into the embedded base of cellular subscribers because of the PCS networks' (PCN) cost and performance advantages over cellular networks.
Conclusion
Since business needs determine communication needs, cellular applications vary from business to business. Managers must evaluate how alternative forms of communications may be incorporated into systems to improve productivity, lower cost structure, and improve communications between functions and between companies.
Cellular communication technology gives corporations the ability to extend the bounds of a their communications infrastructure to mobile-untethered users. Many corporations can and are translating this mobility to a competitive advantage by enhancing inter and intra-company communication. Competitive advantages may be achieved in many ways including improving the quality of a company's products or services, improving the relationship between a firm and its stakeholders, increasing productivity, and lowering costs (e.g., Freeman, 1984; Porter, 1980).
The opportunities for further research in the field of cellular technology include quantifying how the technology improves productivity in organizations, developing migration strategies to PCS platforms, and integrating the technology into the existing data network infrastructure.
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