I have heard that GTE may not be ready. They won't have enough time to finish all the test. I can't confirm that . Pac Bell is in trouble. AT&T is behind. Does anyone know about Cellular one or any closest to compliance? Which would you sign up with for cellular service?

-- Ray (Ray@abc.com), October 27, 1999

Answers

GTE's Sprint PCS is a new system that is digital. If the digital network is down it falls back to analog. It comes with a 3 year guarantee. I asked about Y2K and sales rep said the Sprint PCS internal system is running 4 digit dates. The guarantee says they will replace the phone if it fails to work for any reason including Y2K.

-- Bill P (porterwn@one.net), October 27, 1999.

Bill P,

It is more accurate to say that it will "roam" to the analog system as Sprint utilizes a Code Division Multiplex Access system in all their markets (except D.C. - where they employ the European Standard i.e., GSM). All of the wireless carriers are about par with system reliability (read In Service Performance (ISP)) and the three main infrastructure vendors (Nortel, Lucent & Ericsson) have done quite well in remediating their S/W with regards to the Y2k problem. The impact to the system (with regards to Y2k) would lie within the Billing area (and the associated Home Location Registry (HLR)). Finally, the only real concern with Operations of the system occurred back a couple of months (GPS Rollover) as the majority of the systems obtain their synchronization signal (useful for frequency generation within the base stations) from a the satellite system. Finally, all of the major equipment vendors along with several of the operators participated in a Y2k evaluation test held back in 1st Quarter '99 to evaluate their corrections - NO PROBLEMS were discovered and it was conducted with Test Labs and portions of the Live Network connected to one another and passing data back and forth (i.e., billing records, intersystem handoffs, etc.). It boils down to pricing, coverage and accessability - alot of the providers are having problems keeping their networks beefed up to handle the increased usage (ever since AT&T Wireless implemented 10 cents/min anywhere). Regards,

-- william holst (w_holst@hotmail.com), October 27, 1999.

Sorry, should have been Multiple and not Multiplex...

-- william holst (w_holst@hotmail.com), October 27, 1999.

This is a first for me, a little shameless advertising...

A good friend of mine works with the equipment at Omnipoint. They are located in the NE, and parts of the SE. They offer digital PCS service, similar to Sprint. Virtually all new stuff in the past few years.

He has said, that even if the rest of the country is down due to Y2K, Omnipoint customers will still be able to call each other. I have no reason to doubt his word, but I wonder how much fuel each of those backup generators has, at all of those cell towers.

For what it's worth. <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), October 27, 1999.

Sysman,

Actually, majority of cell sites employ a 1-3 hr battery bank and not a generator...They reserve the use of generators for the Mobile Switching Center - if the transceivers are not keyed up to support tremendous amounts of traffic than the site might be able to provide service for a bit longer than the 1-3 hrs. Regards,

-- william holst (w_holst@hotmail.com), October 27, 1999.