San Francisco Opens its Golden Gate to CDPD

Several communication service vendors demonstrated at last year’s Fall COMDEX that hype and unbridled enthusiasm is far from limited to the pen computing world. In fact, notwithstanding the technical glitches surrounding the roll-out of services in the Las Vegas area, many predicted a sea change in the world of wireless communication with the introduction of the Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) protocol.

A year later, and after several CDPD service providers have failed to execute their overly aggressive nationwide rollout, CDPD continues to be slowly deployed in important markets and will likely establish a respectable presence in the developing wireless landscape.

This is evidenced by the recent introduction of CDPD service by GTE Mobilnet into the lucrative San Francisco Bay Area market covering not only the city and suburbs, but also the east and south bay (the later being home to Silicon Valley).

GTE is targeting its CDPD service to users that require quick and bursty data transmission. Typical applications requiring this type of service are credit card verification, delivery tracking, field service dispatch, and electronic messaging.

GTE has priced the service to support a range of usage levels, not unlike the current cellular telephone price structure. GTE expects that prices will effectively range from 12 to 19 cents per kilobyte based on the monthly volume.

GTE views this introduction as a first step in a nationwide deployment with the city of Houston following before year end, and other cities coming online in 1995.

GTE Personal Communications Services
245 Perimeter Center Parkway
Atlanta, GA 30346
(404) 391-8000