A well-educated, detail-oriented friend recently threw up her hands in disgust after a casual chat about the tangled web of mind-dizzying service plans available to the booming ranks of wireless-phone users, some 76 million strong in the U.S. alone. "What do these companies think they're doing with all the numbers they put out there!" this normally soft-spoken professional was saying quite emphatically. "Why can’t they give us a couple of plans to choose from and leave it at that?"
    Well, it would make this here job a whole lot easier, but that can’t be worrying the techno-frenzied minds at the five wireless carriers that serve San Diego. Yep, count 'em, five: Sprint PCS, GTE Wireless, Nextel, AirTouch and Pacific Bell Wireless. Five fiercely competitive wireless-phone proprietors pitching at last count 76 service plans employing nearly three dozen makes of those compact personal communicators. It’s enough to make all but the engineering economists out there shudder with indecision.
    But take heart, ye readers. With the steely nerves of a Mount Everest climber and calm reflection of a Buddhist monk, we at San Diego Metropolitan have decided to brave the mountain of data — and corporate bravado — to deliver a comprehensive look at what’s going on phonewise in our sunny corner of the world.
    The key to the best deal? Most experts follow the logic of Eric Fruits, a Los Angeles-based economist and co-designer of a highly publicized nationwide wireless provider survey of 14 major cities for Econ One Research Inc., now in its third month. "The big thing I’ve learned is, you should really sit back and think about what your usage is," Fruits explains. "If you have a cell phone already, look at your bills and see when you make your calls. . . . Then, shop around. Try out the phones, if you can. Talk to people. And negotiate the best plan you can."
    Econ One's inaugural results for June found San Diego with the second-highest wireless rates among the 14 surveyed cities, cheaper only than Los Angeles on average. By July, the local average rate had dropped 3.1 percent, and suddenly it became more expensive to use a wireless phone in Boston, Detroit and San Francisco. Fruits isn’t so cocky to suggest that his survey got the bean counters busy slashing prices at the local carriers, but they clearly took notice. "Well, I'd like to think that, but we’ve only been doing this a couple months," he says.
    OK, so declining rates — brought on in recent months with the advent of flat-rate pricing among carriers like Sprint and GTE Wireless — should make picking a service plan easy, right? Well, at least on paper. But as with most everything we buy these days, the devil's in the fine print. And the wireless-phone industry is riddled with the teeny, tiny stuff. The chart devised for this story attempts to organize that fine print — with some exceptions.
    Pre-paid plans and service plans offering fewer than 100 minutes of talk time per month were not included, since few heavy-use, business customers opt for these low-priced options. (Both AirTouch and GTE Wireless, it should be noted, are pushing low-cost pre-paid plans with inexpensive analog phones that are ideal for emergency purposes and credit-challenged entrants into the wireless world.) Promotional offers also were not included.
    In addition, activation charges and early-termination fees won’t be found on the chart, since they're more or less straightforward: AirTouch and Pacific Bell Wireless charge $20 to set up, $150 to cancel; GTE Wireless $10 for activation and $25 for every month remaining on the contract to get out; and no charge for such things at Sprint PCS and Nextel. Also excluded: billing method. Unfortunately, if the process of rounding up to the next minute is the bane of your existence, Nextel is your only haven in San Diego with its per-second billing — after the first minute, that is.
    Fruits points out that may be Nextel's greatest virtue. As most economists do, Fruits says he recently was toying with numbers — somehow, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association had determined that the average cell phone call lasts slightly longer than 2 minutes, 23 seconds. For a 600-minute-a-month user on a round-up-to-the-next-minute plan, "on average they've got about 152 minutes they pay for but aren’t using if you have this full-minute billing," he notes. For Nextel users, "that could be a substantial cost savings." Future surveys may review this trend, Fruits hints.
    Beyond billing, many other options require consideration in selecting a wireless carrier. Averse to being locked into a contract? Then Sprint PCS and Nextel might be appealing with no contract hassles. Travel the country on business frequently? Perhaps the so-called "one-rate" plans — such as AirTouch's National Calling plans, GTE Wireless's America Choice, Nextel's National Business Plans or Sprint's Free & Clear offerings — might solve your no-roaming-charge needs. Big local minutes and low price the top priority? Maybe PacBell Wireless's Digital Value plans are for you.
    Then there's the type of phone — 33 to choose from in the various plans available in San Diego, according to Point.com, a very useful Website for choosing a wireless phone and service plan. When cellular phones were first introduced in the 1980s, they were all analog — radio waves sent via transmitting towers in cell patterns, allowing phone conversations to be moved fairly efficiently from cell to cell. But the phones were as heavy as grandma's fruitcake — and about as aesthetically pleasing. Today, analog phones are more affordable (often offered "free" in exchange for a long-term contract) and sleeker, but disadvantages remain. Batteries in analog phones hold about a day's charge. Calls are easily intercepted by scanners (just ask Prince Charles), and features are limited. But having been around longer, analog has its benefits — the most notable being greater coverage.
    But analysts say the real growth in wireless phone use will come via ones and zeros. Subscribers to digital service, a phenomena of the '90s, are expected to overtake their analog counterparts next year, according to Cahners In-Stat Group, a Massachusetts-based market research firm. In a report released last month on the state of the wireless industry, its researchers predicted that nearly one-third of heavy users will switch to digital this year — apparently swayed less by cost than the promises of improved sound quality and nationwide coverage.
    Add to that the flexibility of dual-mode phones and the future of tri- and quad-mode handsets, and the one-person-one-number mantra of the wireless industry might one day become reality. Ira Brodsky, president of Missouri-based Datacomm Research Co. and an eloquent observer of wireless during the past decade, says years of unfulfilled promises finally may be bearing fruit. He's particularly enthused about this month's nationwide rollout of the Sprint PCS Wireless Web, which will give customers e-mail capabilities and limited Internet access through an intuitive microbrowser found on sleek phones like the NP1000 from Neopoint of La Jolla and Qualcomm's high-end pdQ, a digital phone/PDA hybrid that'll set you back $799.
    Brodsky says the rollout is a pivotal moment for personal communications. "I think it basically puts pressure on the entire wireless telephone industry to start supporting data," he says. GTE and AirTouch have been making noises about similar plans, but neither has a nationwide network. The other big thing here is that wireless data services now will begin to be available to people with off-the-shelf wireless phones. I just don’t think consumers yet understand what things they can do with this."
    But evidently, they soon will.