The universe keeps getting bigger for wireless carriers — and their customers. Verizon Wireless, the combination of the wireless properties of Vodafone AirTouch and Bell Atlantic, sprang into being in March. The first offspring of a traditional cellular telephone outfit to offer nationwide service, Verizon is now the biggest wireless carrier. With 23 million wireless phone customers and 4 million paging customers, Verizon covers 96 of the top 100 U.S. markets. (Too bad for those traveling to Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Youngstown, Ohio and Little Rock.h) And big is getting bigger now that GTE is completing its merger with Bell Atlantic, a merger with major implications for San Diego. More about that later. Big also means an expanded array of services, starting with phones that act as wireless modems and extending to news stories, stock quotes and even limited e-commerce. Verizon, for example, did an unannounced "soft launch" in San Diego this spring of its digital data service that lets certain phones be used as wireless modems, confirms Todd Hallenbeck, Verizon's Southern California technology manager. And AirTouch, um, Verizon, will add more services later this year. But so many companies are piling on the digital data bandwagon that wireless industry analyst Herschel Shosteck says, "The generic message of 'Internet content anytime, anywhere, any device' is already relatively meaningless." More about that later, too. Going National In its April birth announcement Verizon immediately introduced what has now become a standard for national wireless carriers: a line of national pricing plans. These SingleRate plans eliminate roaming and long-distance charges anywhere in the country. So if you’re calling from New York City back to San Diego, there's no extra cost. The published rates start at $35 a month for 150 minutes, and reach up to $150 for 1,500 minutes. Consumers who travel or like to use long distance benefit from nationwide plans because they are simple and uniform. They're anytime minutes usable anywhere in the network (and sometimes off the network as well) for any call in the country. Although the wireless companies still play their shell game of different prices for different buckets of minutes, it’s now fairly easy to do the math and see what the true per-minute rate really is. Several factors are behind this trend. One is that mobile phone users are, well, mobile. They fly around the country, and hate roaming charges and incompatible standards. They just want their phone to work. So the funky local cell companies are being bought out by the bigger ones, and the bigger ones are merging. (Sort of like those pools of liquid metal in "Terminator 2" that rushed together to form the bad guy, but this is a benevolent change). The gravitational pull of AT&T is a second factor. The company’s wireless division shook up the industry in 1998 with its Digital OneRate plan. It promised a cellular nirvana — one price for calls from anywhere in the country to anywhere in the country, even when roaming off the network. In the New York area, the plans start at $60 a month for 300 minutes and reach $150 a month for 1,400 minutes. Digital OneRate has its flaws. For example, it’s not available for San Diego County residents because AT&T Wireless doesn’t operate here — yet. You could travel here and use it, but you'd be roaming on analog. That's because San Diego’s cellular frequency operators don’t use AT&T's Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) technology. They opted instead for Qualcomm's Code Division Multiple Access Technology (CDMA), along with analog. Secondly, AT&T Wireless didn’t have the capacity to handle the hordes of new customers, creating busy signals up the wazoo. Despite these flaws, other wireless companies felt compelled to respond and even improve on AT&T Wireless offerings. Sprint PCS promotes its own battery of "Free and Clear" national calling plans. These are much cheaper than AT&T's. Until June 30 customers could get 1,000 minutes for $75 a month, including either long distance or its wireless data services. However, roaming off the Sprint PCS network costs extra. The company’s usual rates amount to a dime a minute, such as $50 for 500 minutes. At the low end, pay $30 a month for 180 minutes. And Sprint PCS hasn't had the capacity issues that have bedeviled AT&T Wireless. Industry analysts say the carrier is using only about half its capacity. The other carriers serving San Diego that offer national plans are GTE, Pacific Bell Wireless and Nextel. GTE's AmericaChoice charges $65 for 325 minutes and $155 for 1,500 minutes. But of course, GTE is vanishing into the maw of Bell Atlantic. Several months ago, Pacific Bell Wireless quietly introduced its own national plan at a dime a minute, starting at $100 a month for 1,000 minutes and going up to $200 a month for 2,000 minutes. More recently, the company sweetened the deal, with $100 a month buying 1,100 minutes on the national plan, and either no long distance fees or 1,000 weekend minutes. The company also unveiled a nationwide no roaming plan called Digital Edge USA. For $100 a month, you get 900 minutes with no long distance charges, usable across the country. Nextel's national business plans start at $70 for 400 minutes and go up to $200 for 2,000 minutes. But the company is bidding to shake things up even more with its Nextel Worldwide service, announced in April. With dual-digital mode phone that costs $249 with $100 off (promotional pricing), Nextel subscribers can call in more than 65 countries, and 18 of the world's 25 biggest cities. Nextel uses a digital technology from Motorola called iDen, deployed in 96 of the 100 biggest markets in North and South America. The dual-digital mode phone also works on the GSM technology, on frequencies used in Europe and Asia. Nextel's international calling rates range from 99 cents per minute for calls made in most of Europe, $1.99 per minute for Asia, South America and the Middle East, and $2.99 to $4.99 per minute in Africa, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. For consumers, this plethora of national calling plans means more competition and lower prices. And more is coming. The GTE wireless property in San Diego has been sold to AT&T Wireless, along with the Cellular One system in the Bay Area and another one in Texas. That may be an inconvenience to those who wanted to stay with GTE, but it gives AT&T Wireless a long-needed foothold in the respective top technology and top wireless technology areas of the country. It’s likely to be expensive and time-consuming to convert San Diego over to AT&T Wireless's TDMA system. But there's precedent for that: Sprint PCS replaced a GSM system in Washington, D.C., with CDMA. An even more interesting entrant would have been Leap Wireless, which offers unlimited flat-rate local calling for $30 a month. Harvey P. White, Leap's chairman and chief executive officer, said the company frequently gets asked when it will offer service in San Diego. But first, he adds, he must get the spectrum. Now that the GTE wireless spectrum in San Diego has been sold, there's another alternative: spectrum once purchased by bankrupt NextWave in San Diego, part of NextWave's holdings that may be sold by the federal government. Data Galore With the rallying cry "The Internet in Your Pocket," wireless phone carriers are unveiling all sorts of new services. Sprint PCS has been the most aggressive consumer-oriented phone company in this sphere, with its Wireless Web, and now Verizon is trying to catch up fast and pull ahead. Pacific Bell Wireless offers its PCS Data Connect for $4.95 a month and 15 cents per minute, but its wireless modem option only connects at 9,600 bits per second, compared to 14,400 bits per second for Sprint PCS and Verizon. Sprint PCS charges an extra $9.95 a month for Wireless Web, but waived it for the first six months under its recent sale. Verizon Wireless won’t charge extra for its Mobile Web service, Hallenbeck says Nextel offers its customers news and other services from MSNBC.com and MSN Mobile from MSN, formerly known as the Microsoft Network. MSN Mobile allows customers to get information delivered to them on a timetable of their choice. These include the usual stock quotes, news, weather information and sports scores, along with notification when the user has received a Hotmail message. All competitors with national calling plans offer the wireless modem option. Carried to its logical conclusion, that means people willing to spend the cash could dispense with connecting their laptop or handheld computers to hotel or airport lobby phone lines, and just dial their local number. But the pokey 14,400 bits per second — half that of the typical wireline modem a few years ago — deters data-intensive Web surfing, although most e-mail comes through fine. Hallenbeck says the main obstacle to raising the transmission speed for Verizon, at least, is capacity and infrastructure, not technology. Simply put, someone using a wireless modem connecting at 144,000 bits per second, roughly the speed of an ISDN line, would use 10 times the capacity as someone dialing in at 14,400. So persons using wireless data links at great speeds could "monopolize a cell site," Hallenbeck says. Another consideration is how to price such high-speed use. Nevertheless, Verizon Wireless does plan to increase wireless modem speeds, possibly to 56,000 bits per second to start off with. That's as fast as the fastest conventional modem can achieve. In the longer term, speeds could reach one million bits — one megabit — per second. "I dare say two years is pretty reasonable," Hallenbeck says. "It could go six months on either side of that." Verizon also could act as its own Internet service provider, he added. Instead of dialing another Internet provider, Verizon customers would just connect directly to the Internet through the wireless link. This could be done with normal software by inserting a dummy dialing code so the program thinks it’s dialing a number. Don't Fence Me In Wireless analyst Shosteck gives a yellow light to attempts to expand on data services to create wireless portals. In a March report, "Walled Gardens - A Brick Wall?" Shosteck warns that wireless data services will thrive only if they're open like the Internet, instead of being closed, proprietary offerings. Attempts to build "walled gardens" of content only available through one carrier, without access to the wider world of the Internet, will be doomed to failure. Shosteck quotes a statement by Vodafone AirTouch's CEO, Chris Gent, who said, "We want our portal and our customers with it. We want to control the customer interface. We won’t surrender this ground." In his report, Shosteck reiterates that customers don’t want to be controlled, and competition in an industry with open standards ensures they'll have an alternative. "In an industry where churn rates often reached 24 to 36 percent and higher annually, the concept of customer ownership was faintly ludicrous in any case," Shosteck writes. "Customers don’t want to be 'owned' in the Internet world."

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