Date: 20 Dec 92 10:43:13 
From: jack@myamiga.mixcom.com
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: GTE Rural Area Phones Go Digital
Reply-To: jack@myamiga.mixcom.com
Organization: TELECOM Digest
X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 12, Issue 913, Message 6 of 10

The following was seen in the Fidonet MDF echomail conference, and is
forwarded without comment:

* From : Michael Henderson, 1:130/37 (16 Dec 92 21:42)
* To   : All
* Subj : Wireless Phone System

    I thought the following might be of interest to the members of
this echo.  I had no idea this sort of thing was being contemplated.

GTE makes rural area's phones entirely digital.

By Jean Pagel
Associated Press Writer

QUITAQUE, Texas (AP) -- A phone call to a neighbor miles across this
rugged terrain isn't what it used to be.

Something new is in the air -- literally -- over the scruffy brush,
hills and sheer drops below the caprock.

Radio waves are carrying callers' voices in technology that officials
say makes Quitaque the world's first city with entirely digital phone
service.

"It's the first wireless shot heard round the world," said Dave Smith,
vice president for corporate communications for Pennsylvania-based
InterDigital Communications Corp., which developed the technology.

"The significance is mind boggling in the years to come because
everything is going to go wireless."

GTE spent two years developing and installing the replacement to
traditional phone poles and wires. The switchover Dec. 2 went
smoothly, company officials said.

Bob Wolter, InterDigital's vice president for sales, explained the
system like this: A town resident picks up his receiver to make a
call.  A signal shoots through a short underground cable to a cluster
box shared by 24 customers.

The signal passes through the cluster up a nearby pole, where an antenna
points to a radio transmission tower in Turkey, 10 miles east. The tower
then signals equipment 30 miles northeast in Lakeview to trigger a dial
tone that buzzes back the same route.

That process takes 40 milliseconds, Wolter said.

Outside town, the process works the same way, except each rural
customer has his own pole and antenna.

Buddy Langley, chairman of InterDigital subsidiary Universal Service
Telephone Corp. in Irving, said the signals are sent through radio
frequencies the Federal Communications Commission assigned.

The FCC allotted the Quitaque system up to 23 frequencies in the range
of 450 megahertz, Langley said. The system can handle as many as 92
simultaneous telephone conversations.

Quitaque, a town of 513 people 90 miles northeast of Lubbock, made an
excellent pilot site because its 1970s-dated switching equipment
needed replacing anyway, officials said.

Skeptical residents warmed to the system after officials met with them
to explain benefits: No more lines broken by ice or high winds; no
threat of calls being monitored; greater clarity.

"You don't have to talk like this anymore," Wolter shouted into a
pretend receiver.

"We're proud to see the overhead wires go by the wayside," said
Quitaque banker O.R. Stark. "They've been nothing but problems."

The switch cost customers nothing.

GTE saves in no longer having to lay and maintain miles of copper wire
to serve isolated customers on these vast ranches and cotton and
peanut farms, said John Bowman, a GTE technician in Memphis.

The old poles and wires will remain in place, unused, while GTE and
InterDigital monitor the system for six months.

Smith called the Quitaque test a landmark in mobility: "It's the
dawning of a whole new communication evolution."

                      ------------------

 From Jack Decker --- 1:154/8.0 FidoNet, Jack@myamiga.mixcom.com
Gated through a Linux system