Los Angeles Cellular Telephone Co. introduced three SmartDigital U.S.A. rate plans offering wireless calls for 20 cents to 25 cents per minute without roaming fees in more than 7,000 cities across the country. The monthly plans include 350 minutes of airtime for $60, 700 minutes for $86 or 1,100 minutes for $130. Each plan includes free weekend minutes in the local calling area.
Standard and Poor’s has maintained its ratings on Paging Network Inc.’s debt, including a Bb- for its corporate credit, a B-for its subordinated debt and a Bb bank-loan rating. Its outlook for the company remains stable. S&P said the outlook reflects PageNet’s high debt leverage and weak cash flow to interest expense coverage, offset by the company’s dominant position as the paging industry’s largest operator, with 10.5 million customers.
Spyglass Inc., in collaboration with Lucent Technologies Inc., demonstrated a concept prototype service using voice-activated Web browsing. The service demonstrated by Spyglass enables users to search through standard Web pages by calling one phone number and giving voice commands to obtain voice-synthesized sports scores, weather information and stock quotes, the company said.
Intellivoice Communications Inc. announced AirTouch Cellular will launch a voice-dialing service in Atlanta using its speech recognition solution, branded EasyDial. AirTouch will market the service as a commercial trial, with plans to extend the service to its other markets. The service will cost an extra $3 a month for any AirTouch user.
Arch Communications Group Inc. has selected technology from Informix Corp. and MapInfo Corp. to provide a Web-enabled application that will allow customer service representatives to determine customers’ exact paging coverage. The application is being developed for Arch’s corporate intranet to allow customer service representatives access to it, regardless of location. The information management system also will be included on Arch’s e-commerce site so customers may choose their own coverage area via the Web. Informix will provide its Dynamic Server with Universal Data Option, and MapInfo will add its SpatialWare DataBlade Module.
