NEW YORK-AirLink PCS, the E-block fledgling of a century-old local exchange carrier, has found a niche providing its prepaid “Super Cordless” service for calling from and within a six-county area of Michigan.
“We’ve had visits by dozens of people from the E- and F-block licensees, which have a little bit of territory. There is a big group expected to come to market in these rural areas. No one we’ve talked to has seen what we offer,” said L.J. Caruso, general manager of wireless.
There is more to come. This summer, AirLink is rolling out mobile recharge, whereby customers can buy prepaid cards and activate them by phone.
“You can’t justify this without a certain number of subscribers. But you have to do it when you see overload, when recharge degrades quality of service for new customers,” Caruso said.
AirLink also is gearing up to debut mobile origination, in which customers can activate service over their handsets. However, customers walking into AirLink’s four direct distribution outlets to recharge their phones often wind up buying additional services or convincing a companion to sign up for service. To expand that type of connection, the carrier is negotiating with neighborhood computer and electronics stores to sublet space for about a dozen AirLink-branded sales centers.
“When you come in as an E- or F-block carrier and you’re trying to build identity, you can’t get Circuit City or Best Buy as distributors because they want a national brand,” Caruso said.
Besides expanding distribution, AirLink also seeks to expand services. In November, it plans to debut the capability for its customers to receive messages from personal computers and to send messages between handsets on the network-all without the need for short message service.
Among business customers, AirLink said it has had great success since its launch in February of a service that connects its switch to private branch exchanges, Caruso said. Incoming calls are routed automatically to the first handset the recipient picks up, whether it is the fixed line or mobile unit.
However, the PCS provider has discontinued offering toll-free numbers, preprogrammed into subscriber identity modules, that allow customers to buy items like airline, entertainment and sports events tickets.
“We figured that since we couldn’t do WAP, we could at least offer easy access to these, but most people deleted the numbers from their SIM cards,” Caruso said.
Barry County Telephone Services, established at the dawn of the 20th century, won the radio-frequency licenses for the Michigan counties of Barry, Branch, Calhoun, Kalamazoo, St. Joseph and Van Buren. As its executives looked for a manager of these properties, Caruso was winding up his six-year tenure establishing a cellular network in the same territory for Centennial Cellular Corp.
“The whole operation started on a napkin in a restaurant. The challenge for us is not to be a cellular look-alike, with handset subsidies and contracts. Often prepaid customers are charged more than postpaid, but we wanted to make prepaid more attractive than postpaid,” he said.
Building out from the larger cities, like Kalamazoo and Battle Creek, AirLink made a soft launch of its service with 13 cell sites in operation about a year ago.
“We had a full-scale launch with somewhat of dependable service in October, and we’re now up to 60 cell sites and have passed the 5,000 customer mark-on target with what we anticipated,” Caruso said.
“The corridors and the main thoroughfares are covered, but our goal is 230-250 cell sites. We want a clear alternative to a home (wireline) phone, but we can’t be that yet, although we do have that kind of in-building coverage in some areas.”
AirLink customers buy their L.M. Ericsson, Motorola Inc. or Nokia Corp. phones for $90 to $500. The carrier also is awaiting delivery of handsets from Mitsubishi Electric Corp. By comparison, cordless phones retail for about $90 to $300, Caruso said.
Even more than new phones, the general manager said he wishes for “hands-free kits for the home, but none of the vendors will listen to us.”
For $25, AirLink customers receive 200 minutes of airtime, and features that include voice mail, conference calling, call waiting and caller ID. The average AirLink customer replenishes that $25 worth of prepaid minutes twice each month, and less than 1 percent discontinue service.
“How do we know about churn? We look at replenishment reports. When they haven’t done so in several months, I spend my customer service reps’ time contacting them,” Caruso said.
The carrier’s prepaid minutes are good for one year, after which there is a 45-day grace period. Upon request, all customers may receive an itemized list of calls charged to their number each month.
AirLink PCS has gotten some customers who used to be Nextel Communications Inc. subscribers, Caruso said. In Delton, Mich., where AirLink competes with its parent company’s cellular service, the personal communications services carrier is keeping within the Barry County Telephone Enterprises fold customers who might otherwise go to Sprint PCS, he added.
Furthermore, BCTE also bundles its wireline Internet service provision offerings to AirLink customers. Eventually, the parent company’s goal is to have Internet access as its only wireline offering, with all other communications services transitioning to wireless, Caruso said.
“We’ve come up with a service offering that has made people a bit more tolerant of us as we launched. When we sell to coverage, there will be people who will be disappointed,” he said.
“In the outlying suburbs, we’ll sell to coverage where they live and work. We are Super Cordless, so you save the most where you are the most, and 90 percent of the time, usage is within a 50-mile radius.”
While AirLink does not offer mobile roaming on its Global System for Mobile communications 1900 network, it does allow customers to make and receive long-distance calls, including international calls. For outgoing calls, its customers pay the long-distance charges. For incoming calls, Airline users pay the local rate and the party calling them pays the long-distance charges.
