While analog technology is still far and away the most popular flavor of cellular telephone service, the newer digital service is making impressive gains, said Bob Nelson, president of Cellular One Midwest, based in Schaumburg.
Digital service accounts for about 15 percent of Cellular One’s call volume and by the end of this year it will probably be up to 30 percent.
“It’s growing at a good pace,” Nelson said. “Not so fast that it’s hard to adjust, but very steady.”
Digital service is more popular with customers who use their wireless phones a lot, Nelson said, and analog phones appeal to people who mostly carry their phones so they can make a call in case of car trouble or some other unexpected event.
It will probably be 10 to 15 years before digital wireless service displaces analog completely, Nelson said, and when that happens, it will likely be a non-event.
“Today you have a lot more choice of analog phones, but that will change,” he said. “I’d guess that vendors eventually will stop making analog phones and focus strictly on digital. It would be like trying to find a black-and-white TV today.”
It will probably be five years or more before wireless phone networks will handle enough calling volume to make a business case for competing with traditional wireline service, Nelson said, although there are some customers today who rely upon their cellular phone as their only personal phone service.
A slam in the face: Unauthorized transfer of someone’s phone service, or slamming, is opposed by all the major carriers that regularly bring court action against fly-by-night firms, but sometimes when a customer is slammed, she finds herself all alone trying to straighten things out.
That’s the position of Kathy Posner, a Chicagoan who was slammed last year by an outfit called Minimum Rate Pricing Inc. She instructed Ameritech Corp. to put a lock on her account so that her long-distance service couldn’t be changed from MFS WorldCom, her designated carrier, without her explicit consent.
But guess what? In January, Posner noticed that Ameritech was billing her long-distance calls to Minimum Rate Pricing. When she called to complain, she was told that her carrier is still listed as MFS WorldCom. But the billing, at more than double the MFS rates, still comes from Minimum Rate Pricing.
Even though Posner has talked to every company involved, she’s gotten no satisfaction.
An Ameritech spokesman says when she makes a long-distance call, it is handed off to MFS WorldCom and Ameritech has nothing to do with it after that.
MFS WorldCom says it never gets the calls. Posner said when she called Minimum Rate Pricing, the man she talked to “was very, very rude.”
The Ameritech spokesman, Rob Lanesey, said that Ameritech has filed a complaint with Minimum Rate Pricing, but that’s all the local carrier can do because its records still show MFS WorldCom as Posner’s carrier.
“I’m in slamming hell and can’t get out,” Posner said.
Saving steam: Steam engines may conjure visions of 19th Century factories and seem fairly low tech and unimportant in the Information Age, but don’t discount the importance of this mature technology or the need for conservation, say federal energy watchers.
Last week brought officials of the U.S. Department of Energy to Bethlehem Steel Corporation’s Burns Harbor plant in Chesterton, Ind., to launch a Steam Challenge to encourage industry to conserve steam.
U.S. manufacturers depend upon more than 54,000 large boilers to drive mechanical equipment and manufacture electricity, the steam moguls said. This steam accounts for some $21 billion a year in energy costs. The Steam Challenge is to improve efficiency by 20 percent over the next dozen years, a goal that would trim $4.2 billion from industry’s annual steam bill.
`Heroes of Chemistry’: Two local scientists who helped to develop ozone-friendly chemicals for use in automobile air conditioning systems were honored recently by the American Chemical Society as “heroes of chemistry.” Alan P. Cohen of Highland Park and Peter K. Coughlin of Mundelein, worked at UOP LLC in Des Plaines to produce drying agents compatible with environmentally friendly auto air conditioning. The award program is an effort to draw attention to industrial research that changes the world for the better, said Paul Walter, president of the chemical society.
Lab low on funds: A budget crunch at Fermilab near Batavia leaves the federal science lab with a painful choice, said John Peoples, Fermilab’s director. The lab faces a shortfall of $6 million in the coming fiscal year and a $30 million deficit in the fiscal year after that.
As Fermilab scrambles for funds, some engineers, physicists and software professionals are leaving for spots in the private sector.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever seen physicists able to go to outside industry and raise their salaries by 80 percent,” Peoples said.
In outlining his lab’s woes to a panel of outside experts and the federal Department of Energy that funds Fermilab, Peoples talked for 2 hours and 20 minutes.
“This is my Fidel Castro speech,” he told his audience.
