GREAT EXPECTATIONS When Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems (BAMS) launches its first . . . CDPD . . . system in Washington . . . it will initiate a new business that will impact the . . . bottom line by 1995. . . . The average monthly bill for cellular is dropping, and . . . new services such as data will boost those bills. 1 This BAMS management expectation was common to all nascent data carriers of the period. But were their expectations realistic? With multiple carriers bringing increasingly untapped capacity to market, is it reasonable to believe that. | The Wireless Data Haadbaak Fourth Edition. James F. DeRose Copyright 1999 John Wiley Sons Inc. ISBNs 0-471-31651-2 Hardback 0-471-22458-8 Electronic 11 AIRTIME PRICE PROJECTIONS GREAT EXPECTATIONS When Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems BAMS launches its first. CDPD . system in Washington . it will initiate a new business that will impact the . . . bottom line by 1995. . . . The average monthly bill for cellular is dropping and . . . new services such as data will boost those bills. 1 This BAMS management expectation was common to all nascent data carriers of the period. But were their expectations realistic With multiple carriers bringing increasingly untapped capacity to market is it reasonable to believe that data prices will permit high-revenue goals SUBSCRIBER CAPACITY POTENTIAL ARDIS reported2 a year-end 1991 capacity for 800 000 field service class subscribers on a system rarely having more than two channels per city and using the inefficient MDC4800 protocol. By April 1993 ARDIS had secured 70 channel pairs in the top 20 cities3 6 each in New York and Los Angeles and begun conversion to the faster more efficient RD-LAP protocol in order to build capacity for the expected Mobile Office PDA boom. That application did not happen. Many base stations were mothballed until the 1997 win of the UPS contract when buildout resumed. Application profiles also changed. Often traffic intensified. Some users who began at two messages per hour moved to one every 10 minutes. The early morning end-of-day message spikes associated with field service were smoothed by 161 162 AIRTIME PRICE P ROJECTIONS the addition of applications with different message profiles. While there are always individual hot spots ARDIS subscriber capacity with the new more message intensive profiles now exceeds 1 million users less than 10 of current network utilization. BSWD has up to 30 channel pairs per major metropolitan area. These channels are only half the width of ARDIS channels and the .
