@BEGIN_FILE_ID.DIZUMF: Cellular Bulletin: Motorola's IRIDIUM & GTE TS's Clone Detector @END_FILE_ID.DIZ _____ _____ _____ _____ _______________ / /\ / /\/ \/ \/\ \ / / / / / __ __ \ \ ________/ / / / / / \ \ / / \ \ \_____ / \_/ / / /\ \/ /\ \ \ ___/ \___________/ /_____/ / \ \_____\ \____\ \__________\ \_____\/ \/_____/ /____/ /\______ ________/\___ \/_____|---|____--------_| /___ _~~~_____________| _/ _\(_) // (___)(___)~~ / (____) \__(__) PRESENTS: CELL BULL2 >MO CELLULAR NEWS FROM UMF< Reprinted from Popular Science March 1994 by The P/\NTHER >UMF< W O R L D P H O N E Your phone one had to be tethered to one location. Now, the fantasy of a wireless phone that works everywhere is beginning to look real. Decades ago, an inventor named Al Gross dazzled a writer friend with his latest creation. It was a radio receiver, small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, that could tune in utterances broadcast from a station a hundred feet away. Although modest by today's standards, it was positively Lilliputian compared to the awkward walkie-talkies of the time. The device used it in his new comic strip. With creative license thrown in, the gadget became a two-way wrist phone that the cartoon's protagonist used everywhere he went. The hero, of course, was Dick Tracy. Now, the vision of one phone and one phone number that works everywhere is about to become reality. In as few as five years, you will be able to buy such an instrument with a phone number that will follow you around the world. Although you won't necessarily wear it on your wrist-and it won't transmit pictures anytime soon-the device will be slim enough to slip into your pocket. By some accounts, it will look like a fat credit card with a mouthpiece. And, with a few significant exceptions, the service shouldn't cost much more than that of wired phones. Walk up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and call Grandma. Ride Amtrak from New York to Seattle, taking customers orders en route. Drift down the Amazon River in a canoe and stay in touch with the world. It'll all be routine. Many executives of cellular phone companies insist you can do much of this today. To an extent, they're right: Cellular phones do allow a great deal of mobility. But cellular systems have serious trouble penetrating the concrete canyons caused by skyscrapers, or reaching inside buildings. And they don't cover many rural areas or foreign countries. Worse, their analog radio signals have been gobbling up limited radio airspace at an unsustainable rate. And sky-high prices and service costs prevail. Yet the coming generation of portable phones, generically named personal communications networks (PCNs) or personal communications services (PCSs), will surmount these drawbacks with a variety of new technologies. In cities, hordes of close-together "microcell" transceivers will supplement or replace similar but more widely spaced cellular towers, extending coverage to every nook and cranny. In the skies, constellations of low-orbit satellites will relay calls to and from ocean-going ships and sparsely populated regions. Updated cellular systems will still have a role to play, especially for car phones. Ultimately, users may not even know which system they are using, as handsets automatically switch from one service type to another, as needed. "The portable phone situation today is like the electric power industry 100 years ago," argues Virginia Tech electrical engineer Theodore Rappaport, who specializes in studying wireless radio communications. "Then, there were huge networks of lines but only a few places to tap in, so few homes had electric power. But power gradually became a personal thing, and now everyone has it. Wireless phones are going the same way. All the new phones-whether advanced-cellular, microcellular, or satellite will be digital. Instead of directly converting soundwaves into physically corresponding radio waves (as analog technology does), they translate conversations into coded strings of 1s and Os. This will bolster privacy, reduce noise, and increase the number of calls sharing the same frequency. THE BIRTH OF IRIDIUM Iridium--the grandest commercial satellite project ever attempted--had a humble beginning. In the mid-1980s, Motorola engineer Bary Bertiger was trying to convince his wife to take a vacation to a remote cay in the Caribbean. Bertiger liked the small island because it had no telephone service; his wife, a real estate agent with deals in the works, disliked-it for the same reason. Bertiger eventually won over his spouse, but the argument prompted him to ponder how his wife might be able to receive calls no matter where she was. A constellation of satellites, it occurred to him, could do the trick. Months later, Bertiger casually mentioned the idea to two of his coworkers, Ray Leopold and Ken Peterson. In their spare time, the three compared Berliner's idea with other schemes for zipping calls around the globe, including networks of high-altitude balloons (Leopold is a former hot-air balloonist) or remotely piloted aircraft. Surprisingly, they concluded that satellites were the simplest and least risky option available. The engineers next faced a formidable math problem: how to arrange orbiting satellites so that at least one would always be within "view" of every location. The engineers didn't know the answer, so they scoured scientific journals until they found the solution: optimally phased polar orbits. This meant launching satellites in a staggered (or"phased") north-south orbital array, passing over the poles so that, at any point in time, the satellites form a giant checkerboard pattern in the heavens. With the correct mathematical formulas now in He suggested they hand, the engineers computed that 77 satellites would do the job.they tag the project "Iridium," after the element with 77 electrons. The name stuck. At first, they titled their system Satellite even though Iridium has since been cut 1 Cellular. Then one day, a sketch of the 66 satellites to reduce the project's cost project reminded a colleague of textbook drawings of the atom, showing electrons buzzing about a nucleus.--R.L. Virtually every telecommunications firm is scrambling to develop PCNs. Already, about a dozen companies are testing primitive microcell technologies in cities; more than 100 hold licenses for future tests. A consortium led by MCI is vying to buy enough licenses to fashion a nationwide portable phone network. AT&T, which once abandoned the cellular phone business, last year turned about-face and gobbled up McCaw, the nation's largest cellular phone company-also with the goal of assembling a seamless countrywide system. AT&T recently established a "700" phone number service, allowing people to purchase one home phone number that follows them throughout the continental United States as long as they choose to keep it. Experts view this offering as the first step toward a day when banks of computers will determine your location and beam calls to you. Another surprise player may prove to be the New Jersey-based Nextel, which is quietly buying the rights to convert taxi and truck radio frequencies to phone service. On a grander scale, Motorola plans to encircle the planet with 66 satellites that will beam calls anywhere on Earth. Even cable TV companies--with the encouragement of the White House and Congress-are hooking up base stations for cordless phones to the cables in peoples' homes. Cable-TV-delivered telephone service could eventually provide a real alternative to dedicated phone lines. Since 1987, the number of cellular subscribers has ballooned from 1.2 million to more than 15 million, according to the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, outpacing that group's own forecasts. As prices decline and availability increases, many experts predict that mobile phone ownership will surge to 60 million by the year 2000. Wall Street telecommunications industry analyst William Deatherage goes further. "By 2010 or possibly earlier, all [U.S. telephone handsets] will be wireless," he optimistically predicts. This growth continues despite several incidents that have raised concerns over the safety of cellular phones. One potential problem surfaced last December, when a senior Motorola engineer charged that his brain cancer, expected to be fatal, was caused by radiation emitted during tests of the firm's prototypes in the mid-1980s. Motorola officials deny the charge and say the company wouldn't be in the cellular phone business if the technology wasn't safe. They point to a University of Utah study that gave a clean bill of health to cellular phone use. That study, based on 10 handheld phones from four manufacturers, involved computer simulations and magnetic resonance imaging. Dr. Om Gandhi, who conducted the study, found that "most electromagnetic absorption occurred in the upper part of the ear, consisting mostly of cartilage, and the skin behind it, with rapidly diminishing absorption for nearby tissues in the head." He claimed that the level of radiation absorbed by the brain was less than 25 percent of the safety limits set by the government for radiation absorption. Nevertheless, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has reiterated that there is insufficient data to determine whether cellular-phone use is safe or not. Meanwhile, advances in wireless communications technology may eventually alter the meaning of the word phone. Nationwide wireless data networks being developed by several companies will be able to send vast quantities of data over the same systems that transmit phone conversations. (Two slow-speed data networks exist today.) With a new personal "communicator" that performs telephone, electronic mail (e-mail), fax, and computer functions in one portable device, you'll be able to call up stock quotes, newspaper reports, or your company's latest sales figures, as well as ring up friends wherever you go. Ultimately, you'll also see wireless video. "There's no reason why a simple wrist phone couldn't provide both video and voice transmission," asserts Rappaport, who has simulated how such a device might work in his laboratory. Aspiring Dick Tracys, though, will have to wait until the next century or the rest of the 1990s, reality is likely to be more constraining than these expansive visions. Cellular carriers, long-distance phone giants, regional Bell operating companies, and startup companies are all pursuing their own slightly different mobile phone schemes. Ideally, someone will craft a single handset to work with everyone's system. But no one has figured out how to patch the various systems into a worldwide network or--perhaps more to the point--how to compel long time competitors to cooperate. The U.S. portable phone business "is becoming too fragmented," frets Rappaport. Instead of one phone that works everywhere, he fears we may end up with, say, ten completely incompatible phones that function in ten different ways in ten separate locations. Many technical kinks must also be smoothed out. Despite improvements, mobile telephony still isn't as reliable as landline. The biggest trouble, arguably, is interference from other radio devices, particularly other portable phones--a jinx that wired phones rarely face. In a Pittsburgh test of advanced mobile phones, conducted by Bell-Atlantic, for example, participants complained about too much static or being cut off in midconversation. Still, "wireless technology is getting close to providing voice quality as good as wireline," insists Rutgers University electrical engineer David Goodman. But the biggest question mark remains access to radio airspace, or spectrum: Who gets it and how much do they control? Starting late this spring, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission will auction off large new parcels of wireless radio frequencies. Altogether, it will distribute three times more fequencies than exist for cellular service today--in theory, plenty for a true nationwide mobile service. In reality, it won't be that simple. Instead of granting national licenses as some have proposed, the FCC--aiming to foster competition--has split the country into 51 large regions and 492 subregions. Beginning this May, companies will vie for some 2,500 regional and subregional licenses. Experts expect confusion as firms scramble to develop alliances and piece together interregional service. Three companies--American Personal Communications, Cox Enterprises, and Omnipoint Communications-won't have to compete in the phone auction, however. Late last December, the FCC gave them an early Christmas present by awarding each a free chunk of spectrum under a "pioneer's preference" program intended to reward innovative companies. As a consequence, consumers in the three metropolitan areas encompassed by these spectrum blocks--New York, Los Angeles, and the Washington/Baltimore area--may get cheaper and more convenient portable phone service sooner than the rest of the country. American Personal Communications, for example, plans to provide two-way digital phone service within a large region including Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia by early 1995; handsets will be half to a third the size of the smallest cellular phones today, and rates should be about half those of cellular, according to the firm. For their part, Cox and Omnipoint are developing similar services for the Los Angeles and New York metropolitan areas, respectively. All three companies, however, will still have to negotiate deals with other firms to provide phone service outside their regions. "Hey, Ma! Bet you can't guess where I'm calling from." "I've no idea." "The South Pole." "Whaaat?" "I borrowed someone's satellite phone. I'm wrapped in three coats, like the rest of my tour group. " Woman to her husband: "Hey, Archie, Danny's on the phone, calling from the pole!" "Mom, I gotta go now...this call's probably already cost me 10 bucks." The Cadillac of all the new ventures is Motorola's Iridium. By 1998, the company will spend $3.4 billion to surround the Earth with 66 communications satellites, so high-flying executives and other globetrotters can connect via satellite from the remotest wilderness. And Motorola isn't without competitors. Several other companies--including TRW and Loral Aerospace--are hustling to launch similar, albeit smaller, orbiting phone networks by the mid-to-late 1990s. None of the systems will have to compete in spectrum auctions, because they have access to other frequencies. Unlike normal communications satellites that hover in stationary orbits tens of thousands of miles above the equator, Iridium will consist of dozens of low-orbit satellites spinning in circular orbits only a few hundred miles above our heads. These short distances will make it practical to beam calls directly from small cellular-size handsets to satellites--or vice versa. As long as a satellite is overhead, you'll be in business. "Iridium will provide [two-way] coverage to every square meter of Earth, including the North and South poles," enthuses John Windolph, a project spokesman. Wall Street tycoons will be able to converse with their offices from their yachts in the middle of the Pacific. Stranded wilderness explorers can send out distress calls by punching in a few digits. And remote African villages--with an assist from government or international subsidies--may receive phone service for the first time. Subscribers will pay for this kind of service. Iridium handsets alone will cost $3,000, Motorola estimates, and service charges will run about $3 per minute, not including extra fees for calls that also pass through landline networks. The other satellite constellations plan on charging much lower per minute costs--although, with only from 12 to 48 satellites, they'll correspondingly serve less expansive portions of the planet. In any case, most systems will come with dual-mode handsets so subscribers can switch to cheaper land based service when possible. It remains to be seen whether Motorola or the other satellite-oriented companies can sell their no-holds-barred projects to the rest of the world. Potential trouble spots include the complex satellites themselves, which will require intricate circuitry to switch phone calls from one satellite to another. And then there's the logistical nightmare of having to launch replacements as the satellites inevitably fail. Finally, the likely entrance of Inmarsat--the international consortium that operates the radio system used by ships--into the satellite phone arena may create potent competition. "None of the technical challenges are insurmountable," concludes applied mathematician Neal Hulkower, who has studied satellite telephony for The Mitre Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. But many satellite phone systems--especially Iridium--will "push the state of the art. I don't expect that any of them will be up and running before 2000." Wife:"Honey, where's your phone?" Husband: "It isn't on the wall hook ?" "No, it's not." "What happened to yours?" "I gave it to Jill because her phone broke...and Sam has his at the video arcade. I need a phone to take to the store in case the insurance company calls." "Well, I don't know where I..." "Here it is!. It was in your pants pocket...about to go out to the cleaners!" While Iridium may provide Motorola with a celestial empire, it will never bring portable phones to everyone (even if they can afford it). That's because each individual satellite has to cover a large expanse of Earth, making it impossible to juggle more than a few million users at a time. For true mass-market mobile telephony, most companies are counting on a down-to-earth (literally) technology dubbed microcellular. Unlike cellular, in which one central radio tower, or base station, receives and broadcasts all calls over a region or "cell" several miles in diameter, microcellular will divide territory into much smaller chunks, or "microcells," just a few blocks in diameter. Mounted in the center of these microcells--on walls, phone poles, or even inside subway stops--will be base stations as small as shoe boxes. In a built-up area, tens or hundreds of microcells can replace a single large cell, enabling callers to reuse radio frequencies. The upshot: Microcell systems can handle dozens of times more users than cellular, and hundreds of times more than satellites. In fact, microcells are the only technology that can provide enough radio channels to give everyone in the nation a mobile phone. That's why they will be at the center of tomorrow's PCNs. But capacity is not the only advantage. Because signals from a handset never have to travel very far to a base station, microcellular phone systems will consume less power than cellular. Thus phones can be smaller, operate longer on one set of batteries, and cost less to operate. Finally, base stations will fit in locations that signals from distant cellular towers simply can't reach--inside large buildings or boxed in outdoor locations such as alleys. "It's like using many light bulbs in a building instead of one giant floodlight," says Virginia Tech's Rappaport. Several U.S. companies--including startups, regional Bell operating systems, and cellular companies--have started testing early versions of such future phone systems in cities across the country. In Pittsburgh, to name just one example, several hundred volunteers from Carnegie-Mellon University are helping Bell-Atlantic Mobile try out a two-way phone service that--like many others- -merges microcellular with existing technologies. When a volunteer is inside his home or office, his Motorola Microtac-style phone works like a normal cordless phone, communicating with Bell-Atlantic's wireline phone network. But if he strolls across campus, the handset starts using one of many microcell base stations distributed around the university. Finally, when he's in a car or out of the range of campus base-stations, the phone switches over to the regular Pittsburgh cellular network. (One of the few disadvantages of microcells is that they don't yet work well in autos, because cars speed past base stations too fast for the network to keep up.) As a person moves, the phone continually reregisters its new location with the phone network, so Bell-Atlantic's computers always know where to send incoming calls. The trial is so successful that Bell-Atlantic recently expanded it to Philadelphia Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, most U.S. microcellular efforts will remain limited to small-scale tests until at least 1995. In the meantime, efforts in Britain provide a peek at what a U.S. national personal communications network may look like. London-based Mercury Communications is constructing a $1.7 billion nationwide personal communications network. Starting in London and then spreading throughout the country, the company is erecting hundreds of small base stations. By this spring, they will reach about 24 percent of the populated areas; by 1999, base stations will cover 90 percent of the country. Splitting the difference between microcellular and cellular, Mercury is placing these transceivers roughly 1,000 yards apart in urban areas, and somewhat farther in rural locations--close enough to provide more ubiquitous coverage than cellular, but distant enough to allow Mercury telephones to work with cars or trains traveling up to 100 mph. When the network is complete, Mercury customers, sporting sleek handsets no larger than the smallest U.S. cellular phones today, ill be able to call from virtually any outdoor location--and also *om major indoor facilities like train stations--to anywhere in the country. A middle-aged man in a business suit relaxes on a train. Suddenlyin his left ear, he hears a soft beeping sound. He slides a checkbook-size device from his shirt pocket, and peers at a tiny LCD on the front of the gadget. The words "Caller: Sam Smith" greet him. He presses a red button marked "accept," then detaches a thimble sized earphone / microphone. He snuggles the earpiece into his right ear, placing the handset back in his pocket. "Hi, Joe, hope you aren't busy," in comes Sam's voice. "Nope, just catching the maglev up to Boston for the sales meeting" "I thought we might discuss that marketing report now." "Sure. Let me grab my copy." With both hands free, he spreads several documents over the tray table. "There, that's better. Now let's get down to business..." PHONE PRIVACY ONLY WHEN YOU WANT IT A recent New Yorker cartoon depicts a walking, talking cellular phone that has eagerly reported an incoming call to its owner. Annoyed that his cocktail hour has been interrupted, the owner protests, "Didn't I tell you I'm not taking calls this evening?" All too often, it seems, cellular phones and other communications gadgets add to our convenience at the expense of privacy. While we may no longer need pay phones make calls from outside, phone calls and messages seem to find us when we least desire to be found. At Bell Communications Research (Bellcore) in Morristown N.J., physicist Richard Jenkins thinks he can increase both convince and privacy. He's testing two computer programs designed to ensure that only calls, faxes, or e-mail messages you want reach you wherever you are. The first program, Electronic Reception-screens incoming calls according to phone number of origination. If, after consulting a database, it decides that the call is not important, it transfers the caller to Nolff's voice mail. If the call is more important, it answers and asks the caller to identify himself and state the purpose of call. Next, it says in a smooth male voice, "Please, hold while I attempt to locate Richard." Depending on where Wolff is at the moment, it finds him either by consulting a database that lists likely locations, or by zeroing in on an infrared homing device that Wolff wears. Finally, it forwards the call to the nearest Bellcore campus phone, Wolff's home phone, or his cellular phone; or it pages him. When Wolff picks up the phone, he listens to the caller's recorded message, and either accepts the call or transfers it to his voice mail. The second program, Sift, performs an analogous task for incoming e-mail messages and electronically scanned faxes It reads the "message from" and "subject" For now, both programs remain strictly lines, followed by the content, then sorts experimental. But if a baby Bell decides to everything. The least important information run with Wolff's ideas, you could have your moves into a computer "junk mail" file that own electronic receptionist in a few Wolff reads when he has time; higher priority information is displayed more prominently on his computer menu. If a communication is truly urgent, Sift can page Wolff or use a voice synthesizer to leave a voice-mail message for him. Currently, both programs can rank messages according to the list of priorities that Wolff enters into the computer himself. Future versions, however, may use neural networks to learn from experience. For example, if Wolff immediately erases many consecutive messages from a coworker, the program might automatically relegate the next note from that person to the "junk" file. Wolff envisions enhancing the program's ability to locate people now limited to the Bellecore campus and its surroundings-with satellites. CELLULAR GOES DIGITAL SLOWLY Cellular companies aren't exactly standing still while the world passes them by. Instead, they are slowly replacing the current analog phone systems with digital cellular. Two digital technologies are duking it out to become the national standard: Time-Division Multiple Access (TDMA) and Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA). Both, as their names imply, transmit many calls on a single radio frequency; and both will likely improve sound quality. TDMA, the simpler method, got off to a quick start, garnering the endorsement of the Telecommunications Industry Association in 1989. But lately, the momentum has shifted toward CDMA. "We think CDMA offers better voice quality, fewer dropped calls, better security, longer battery life, and more capacity than TDMA," explains a spokesman for Pacific-Telesis, a leading proponent of CDMA. But CDMA enthusiasts will have to wait for service; CDMA won't be widely deployed until next year at the earliest. In contrast, some companies are rolling out TDMA now.--R.L. Supplied by The Mortician Converted by The P/\NTHER DAILY NEWS - MONDAY BUSINESS Feb 21, 1994 New Software fighting cellular phone fraud By Larry Rosenthal Associated Press NEW HANEN, Conn. - Across the country, high-tech thieves are pulling cellular signals out of the air to create clone phones that let users illegally make calls free of charge. Cellular phone companies have been scrambling to keep up with the pirates. Just when they think they've got one type of fraud licked, another comes along. Southern New England Telephone Co., he Connecticut local phone company, is one of the first seeking to stop cloning with a new weapon: anti-piracy computer software that recognizes unusual calling patterns. Without the software, cellular carriers have often been unable to detect the thievery until legitimate subscribers call to complain about huge bills run up on their accounts by counterfeiters. SNET Cellular is using Clone Detector, aftificial-intelligence software developed by GTE Telecommunications Services, a unit of GTE Corp. With the system, it only takes about six minutes to perform a sophisticated analysis of a call, said Joe Juliano, director of industry matters for SNET Cellular. In the past, the company would have had to spend hours sifting through volumes of calling data to detect signs of counterfeiting. "If it was a couple thousand dollars in one day, we'd pick it up. But if it wasn't that much out of whack yet, generally the customers would pick it up before us," Juliano said. In some cases, the amount of pirated calling time reached into the tens of thousands of dollars, he added. "The technology they are using is just now coming into its own," said Sharpe Smith, a spokesman for the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association in Washington, D.C. "The cellular industry has really banded together and set off on a direction of trying to attack this problem from a technological viewpoint as well as the law enforcement side." Industry estimates of companies' losses from cellular fraud, which is a federal felony, range from $100 million to $300 million a year. Since the industry launched a broad anti-fraud program in 1991, authorities have seized thousands of computer chips used to illegally alter phones, and more than 100 people have been arrested, the association said. While subscribers aren't held responsible for calls made by counterfeiters, they must have their phones reprogrammed with new numbers, a costly inconventicne that companies are trying to avoid. Cellular telephones contain electronic serial numbers that are embedded in the calling signal. Thieves scan the radio waves to locate the codes and cellular phone numbers and then reprogram phones with the stolen information. The clone, or counterfeit, phones are then sold or rented out to drug dealers, white collar criminals and others. Los Angeles and New York are two hotbeds of cellular cloning. Given Connecticut's proximity to New York and the large number of SNET customers who commute to the city, the company worried that its subscribers also faced a high risk from counterfeiters, Juliano said. SNET Cellular provides mobile phone service in every country in Connecticut, the Springfield, Mass., area, and for boaters on Long Island South. Through "roaming agreements" with other carriers, it also provides service throughout the country. The company would not disclose its number of subscribers. END of UMF_C2.txt