WIRELESS WORLD

When she helps Green Bay Packaging employees choose a wireless plan, Karen Szczepanski hands them a three-ring binder chock full of options. As manager of voice and data communications for the company's 29 plants throughout the country, she has already narrowed the offerings to four service providers:

Individuals can choose the plan and handset that best suits their needs. Still, all the choices and continual changes in cellular phone service and other wireless communication can take time to digest, says Szczepanski, who is also president of Northeastern Wisconsin Telecommunications Association, a nonprofit group of service providers and wireless business consumers with some 80 members."

Nine wireless phone carriers now service Northeast Wisconsin, and several other companies offer non-cellular communications services exclusively to businesses. Communications professionals say with so much information bombarding business consumers, the most savvy choose a service by contacting several companies and requesting quotes until they find a plan that meets their needs.

Each provider covers a slightly different region and offers rate plans based on the number of minutes used, locations included in basic service and handset features. For example, Szczepanski suggests local Green Bay Packaging employees choose US Cellular or Cellcom if they intend to spend most of their time in the Fox Valley, because their local plans are more economical. She suggests Verizon or AT&T Wireless if they travel widely and often, because their nationwide calling plans are more reasonable.

The advantages of each cellular and personal communications service providers are continually changing, Szczepanski says.

"Years ago, if I had people going up north, past Abrams, they got Cellcom because that was the only one that worked up north," Szczepanski says. "It's changed a lot now."

Indeed, AT&T Wireless (which was SunCom until a few months ago), among others, boasts excellent coverage throughout Wisconsin, including the northern regions. Licensing agreements with northern Wisconsin carriers enable most cellular phone providers to reach beyond their local markets, so business people can take their phones with them on weekends and vacations when they head north to go hunting or fishing.

As one of the largest all-digitall all PCS-nationwide wireless networks in the country, Sprint is poised to make inroads in the local market. Its aggressive advertising, especially of its hightech video handsets, may help the company elbow into the Fox Valley.

Newcomers continue to enter the regional market, including the most recent, Nextel. Mergers, acquisitions and name changes can add to the confusion over who covers what. For example, AT&T Wireless took over SunCom in September, and although it operates several stores in the Fox Valley, it remains unlisted in the local Yellow Pages. Alltel recently took over CenturyTel. The consumer brand offered by Airadigm Communications is Einstein PCS.

Larger businesses generally deal directly with the service providers, while small-business owners sometimes walk into retail stores authorized to sell specific carriers. For example, Go Wireless offers US Cellular. Bay-com offers AT&T Wireless.

Few company spokespersons admit their carriers may not offer complete coverage everywhere; in many instances, they're broadening their service areas by the minute. Other features set each company apart, of course. For example, US Cellular touts its award-winning customer service. Jim Garvey, area sales manager for US Cellular, says the company employs 40 to 50 customer service representatives trained to exclusively handle questions from business customers. US Cellular's local coverage area includes southern Wisconsin from Green Bay, plus Door County, much of Iowa and Illinois and parts of Missouri and Indiana, though cellular service is available into northern Wisconsin and beyond. US Cellular also promotes rates and plans designed solely for businesses.

"A lot of companies out there will take consumer rates and stack them so they look like business rates," Garvey says. "We actually have a business plan, and you have to be a business to use it. We're not disguising our plans to look like business plans."

One such plan features pay-as-you-go, so that business people don't need to worry about whether they are using too few or too many minutes. At $10 a month and 11 cents per minute, plus a 30-cent-per-minute flat nationwide roaming rate, the plan keeps things simple.

"The pay-as-you-go seems to be a very popular way to go with business, because they don't have to manage flipping and flopping to different rate plans,' Garvey says. "Otherwise, a company can pay lots of money to people trying to manage so many people using different phones."

Free nights and weekends plans offered by many service providers give businesses the chance to pass a perk along to employees, says Tom Nudelbacher, manager for the Go Wireless Appleton stores. They also help businesses avoid monitoring phone calls employees make on personal time.

AT&T Wireless spokespeople like to remind consumers their company was the "pioneer" in establishing a nationwide cellular presence.

"We have the best roaming agreements coast to coast, our service is hands-down the best," says Glenna Haas, vice president and general manager for AT&T Wireless in Wisconsin. "AT&T says we'll charge one rate, no matter where you are. It revolutionized phone service for business travelers. Now, obviously, other companies have copied the concept."

For businesses with offices nationwide, AT&T Wireless can combine the entire company's usage and prepare one bill for everything. Several large paper companies and trucking companies throughout the Fox Valley have chosen to go with AT&T Wireless, Haas says.

"Instead of getting 15 bills from around the country, a lot of companies want to manage their phone use by department, such as the finance group, or sales or marketing and human resources," Haas says. Companies can also receive paperless bills.

AT&T Wireless, among other communications providers, offers a mobile-to-mobile feature, in which company employees can communicate with each other at a low or noadditional cost.

Meanwhile, after several decades offering pagers and other communications services, locally based companies such as Wisconsin Wireless and Tel/Com find themselves competing in the wireless market.

Wisconsin Wireless, based in Little Chute, specializes in unlicensed wireless communication systems, such as in-house wireless phones for hospitals or manufacturing plants. Employees don't use land lines; they carry their phones with them throughout the building. The company operator transfers calls to employee extensions, just as if they were land lines. One or more antennas are installed at the company to handle all the building's communication needs.

"For in-house systems, it's very typical that the extensions associated with the wireless handsets are supplied with dial tones from an in-house system," says Wisconsin Wireless President Roy Vande Hey. "In most cases, the features associated with the telephone system are transparent," and people who call in can't tell the difference.

For outside calls, Wisconsin Wireless contracts with Airadigm Communications, a personal communications carrier (offering 1.9 GHz radio frequency and all digital technology, as opposed to cellular service, which operates at 800 MHz). The system includes all the bells and whistles of a land line, such as conferencing, call transfer and call holding. Any call can go to voice mail or back to an operator.

"You can go two-thirds of the country and keep your extension in your pocket," Vande Hey says. "Typically, people see an immediate gain in productivity by being mobile because they can do multiple tasks. When you're dealing with the need to be looking at records, or machinery on the floor, or customer service issues, rather than having to stay inside the office. The productivity gains that we've seen have never been disputed after we've put in a wireless system. It would be awfully tough to go back to a fixed, wired phone."

Rick Schuchart, president of Tel/Com, has also seen the evolution of the local wireless world. Tel/Com, based in the Fox Cities since 1949, was the first Fox Valley company to offer cellular phone service (through Cellulink, which was bought by Pacific Corporation, which was bought by CenturyTel, which was bought by Alltel). It provides paging systems, voice mail and two-way radio systems, global positioning services as well as Nextel phone service and wireless Internet. The company rents and sells two-way, commercial grade UHF radio systems to event planners and civic event personnel, for example.

"Much to the surprise of many, paging is still a very strong communications tool because it has a very small size and weight, it has a 100 percent building penetration and a long battery life," says Schuchart. Today's pagers can also store and display text messages.

Schuchart, who is also president of Ameritel Paging Inc. and founding investor for PCS Digital Cellcom in Appleton, says the growth in the wireless industry, particularly cell phones, took many people by surprise. The boom hit in the late 1980s, and shortly thereafter after the Federal Communications Commission was ordered to auction off licenses covering high frequencies for the new personal communication services.

"The growth was far, far greater than anybody ever anticipated. The average monthly billing was once about $94 a month, and now that's dropped to $25 to $30."

PCS Digital Cellcom, a personal communication service provider operating with the latest in Code Division Multiple Access technology, offers longer battery life, fewer dropped calls, reduced background noise and enhanced voice quality. For $29.95 a month, consumers can make unlimited calls throughout the Fox Valley. Its services match those provided by Cellcom.

The Nextel network, still under construction, uses IDEN technology, which in effect means it will not roam on an analog cellular system as PCS phones will. However, it can be cost-effective. Schuchart recommends it for tradespeople such as plumbers, builders and electricians, who need a cheaper way to communicate with each other and like its walkie-talkietype service. The phones double as cell phones, but only throughout Northeast and Southeast Wisconsin.

Schuchart is also a managing member of 3GComm LLC, a third-generation wireless communications service that is investigating high-speed mobile wireless data service in this area.

The wireless world is everchanging, of course. By November 2003, the FCC will require all commercial mobile radio service carriers (which includes cellular and PCS phones) to implement wireless phone number portability. That means users will be able to take their existing cell phone numbers with them when they change service providers.