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A Walkie-Talkie for the 21st Century
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Business New Haven
9/7/1998
By: BNH
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With his Nextel digital wireless handset, Joseph Kobylak can enter a three-digit code, press a button on the side of the handset and immediately speak with one - or all - of his sales team. No voice mail. No paging. No phone tag.
“Direct Connect is the old-fashioned, two-way radio brought into the 21st century,” says Kobylak, Nextel's vice president and general manager for the Connecticut/Massachusetts market. “We've taken a form of communication that has been a traditionally blue-collar application and made it applicable to all businesses.”
To date there are approximately 110 Nextel business networks across the country with more than 100,000 members, according to Kobylak. Direct Connect is already being used in industries like agriculture, automotive, building and construction, real estate, hospitality, insurance, media and entertainment, graphics, printers, transportation, technology and government.
Nextel's handset permits a subscriber to speak with just one person, or 100 people - whoever is pre-programmed in to the Direct Connect network. Like a walkie-talkie, there's a button that is pressed to talk and released to listen. There's also a feature that alerts the recipient of the call when it's not convenient to pick up the handset. Using Direct Connect, co-workers can receive immediate notification about a change in plans, or an updated status report - there's no need to set up a conference call or make individual calls.
By reducing the number of calls, Nextel's one-button concept also saves money. A regular call on a Nextel handset costs about 35 cents per minute under the company's Performance 120 plan. Under than same plan, a Direct Connect call costs just 15 cents per minute.
Another money-saver for Nextel subscribers is the elimination of “roaming” fees for both the Direct Connect feature and for regular phone calls made on the handset. And, as long as you are in one of the 400 cities in Nextel's network, you won't lose those advantages.
But the handset is more than just a two-way communication device. When it's not being used for Direct Connect, the handset offers all the bells and whistles that the digital wireless industry is becoming known for: caller ID, text and numeric paging, voice mail, call-waiting, call-forwarding, three-way calling and call restriction, to name a few.
So far, Nextel is the only digital personal communication service in the area offering the “click and talk” feature. However, according to Chuck Murphy, director of marketing for the Northeast region, Bell Atlantic Mobile has looked at the idea but has not decided to offer the service.
“At Bell Atlantic Mobile we feel that the click and talk concept is very application oriented,” he notes. “We believe it would satisfy less than one percent of our customers' needs.”
The same is true at Sprint PCS. “We have something similar on our radar scope,” says Ernie Lindblad.
- F.P.
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