LEXINGTON, Mass.-Wildfire Communications Inc. announced that Century Telephone Enterprises Inc. will begin consumer trials of its Network Wildfire service with residential, business and wireless customers in Louisiana and Wisconsin.
Century will be the first carrier to install the Wildfire service using Compaq Corp.’s ProLiant servers as its solution platform, following the joint marketing agreement between Wildfire and Compaq signed in September. Century-which focuses on providing telecom services to rural markets- also will be the first to introduce Wildfire outside major urban markets and the first to offer Wildfire as a service on both wireline and wireless networks, the company said.
Network Wildfire is an electronic assistant that resides in the network, helping subscribers manage their phone book, messages, incoming calls, schedule and other information using voice-recognition technology.
Users access the service by speaking its name into the phone, such as “Wildfire, read my e-mail,” to perform such functions as send faxes, read e-mails, forward messages and find phone numbers. Wildfire also answers calls for the user, determines who is calling, contacts the user at home or office or cell phone and then either connects the call to the user or forwards it to voice mail at the user’s command.
Century is promoting Wildfire as a single-number, speech-activated service. The service will give Century customers one number for work, car, home, mobile phone and fax and let Wildfire sort out the connections.
“Wildfire is a glimpse of the future of communications tools that are available today,” said Margaret Osborne, vice president of marketing for Century’s Mobile Communications Group. “We are focused on making telephone communication as safe and efficient as possible for our customers in rural markets, many of whom spend long hours in the car. We see the speech-activated Wildfire assistant as a breakthrough in both the safety and productivity of enhanced services. We anticipate that Wildfire will become an important part of our service offerings across all of our territories.”
Century’s trial will involve several hundred customers in Monroe, La., and in Appleton and La Crosse, Wis. Century said it will conduct tests through the second quarter before offering it for full commercial use. Century claims more than 2 million customers in 21 states.
Pacific Bell Mobile Services and Orange plc have been testing Network Wildfire on their respective networks for about a year, although not with the Compaq platform. Pacific Bell said it ended its tests of the service in the San Diego area and reported a positive response. The company currently is in negotiations with Wildfire with hopes of deploying it commercially later this year, a company spokeswoman said. Pacific Bell would be the first network operator to offer Network Wildfire commercially. Orange has reportedly ended its internal trials of the service and is planning to begin external trials soon.
Wildfire’s first incarnation, Wildfire Gold, was an expensive, stand-alone version sold as a premium service to a high-end vertical market. It relied on expensive hardware, cost $150-$200 a month and couldn’t have more than 12 users on one system at a time. The improvements made that resulted in Network Wildfire allow thousands of users access to the service for anywhere between $7-$10 a month.
Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. both extended financial backing to the Wildfire service, looking to extend the service to the desktop arena. The company expects Enterprise Wildfire, a version of the service that will reside within a company’s local area network, to become available sometime this year.
