Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Southern LINC quietly building out capacity

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2003 12:44:31 -0400

Southern LINC quietly building out capacity
By Ryan Mahoney
Birmingham Business Journal

Oct. 27 - Southern LINC isn't worried about losing market share to other wireless providers' new "push-to-talk" two-way radio offerings.
If anything, the regional carrier believes the mainstreaming of its signature walkie-talkie service by the competition will bring it even more business. In fact, it has been quietly preparing for additional customers all year, upgrading its Birmingham nerve center and getting ready to boost capacity to half a million subscribers.
The company, a unit of Atlanta-based Southern Co., has installed millions of dollars in new equipment over the past few months at its hub inside the downtown headquarters of sibling Alabama Power Co. The facility processes all calls made or received by Southern LINC's 270,000 customers in Alabama, Georgia, northwest Florida and southeast Mississippi.
Many of those calls are transmitted over Southern LINC's push-to-talk network, which connects users with one another at the touch of a button rather than by dialing a phone number. Many PTT customers are utilities, public safety agencies and commercial contractors who value the near-instantaneous connections and can afford to pay for them, although the service is growing in popularity among consumers.

Bring on the competition

For years, Southern LINC's only significant PTT competition has been Reston, Va.-based Nextel Communications Inc.
But now the major national carriers are rolling out plans of their own, trying to capture a piece of the profitable market. Verizon unveiled its PTT service in August. Sprint will join the fray by the end of the year, and AT&T and Cingular are expected to follow suit next year.
"Push-to-talk is getting a lot of attention now due to all this competition," says Allan Hill, Southern LINC's manager of network design, who believes his company is poised to take advantage of heightened interest in the service.
"We've got the largest footprint in the Southeast (127,000 square miles of coverage) and the most reliable system in the world in Motorola's iDEN technology," Hill says. "Our calls are connected much quicker; that's something we're very proud of versus all these competitors coming out."
Southern LINC's network already has undergone a series of improvements this year on the heels of strong traffic and subscriber growth, with 20,000 new users added over the past 18 months, according to spokeswoman Gretchen Crawford.  The control room was overhauled in January, and the last of three upgrades to the dispatch system that allows emergency services to track users via GPS is under way. An upgrade to the company's voice mail system is complete, and another to its text messaging system should wrap up this month.
The most significant change, though, will take place in November and December.  That's when Southern LINC will augment its network to handle a maximum of 500,000 subscribers, up from 300,000 currently - the biggest capacity increase to date, according to Hill.
On the back end, the company recently doubled the number of cell sites the network can support to 1,000 from 500.
Southern LINC employs about 200 people in Birmingham.
http://famulus.msnbc.com/famuluscom/bizjournal10-25-010051.asp?bizj==BIR

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