Will business give up its landline phones?

Richmond Breen's first cellular telephone was, by today's standards, a large, unwieldy, unsightly device.

Nevertheless, the Motorola model he purchased in the early 1990s proved to have great redeeming value.

The Reno landscape architect, sole proprietor of Richmond Breen & Associates, had been on a job at a house in northwest Reno, trying to coordinate the delivery of materials.

The homeowners weren't in.

"Every time I needed to use a phone I had to drive two miles to Raley's to use the pay phone," Breen says.

"It was a huge inconvenience."

So he joined the wave of businesspeople then embracing the new convenience of cell phones.

"I bought the big Motorola, about the size of a walkie-talkie.

It was also tough as a boot.

You could run it over with a pickup truck.

I saw it happen.

And I know other contractors who had it happen.

You leave it on the bumper of your truck."

Today, with a hectic schedule full of accounts, Breen is like a great many contractors and businesspeople, period: he can't get by without his cell phone.

Ninety percent of his work is in the field.

Breen uses his sleek new, pocketsize Panasonic for nearly all his business needs, including office tasks.

In that, he differs from a great many people in business today, who continue to maintain landline service even though their wireless phones have become an indispensable workaday appendage and may be overtaking wired usage.

In an increasingly mobile society addicted to instantaneous communication, the number of minutes used on wireless telephones nationwide has nearly doubled since 2000, and the number of customers severing landline service and going exclusively cellular has been growing, as well.

Telephone customers owning only cell phones account for an estimated 3 to 5 percent of wireless users in the United States, according to a 2002 Federal Communications Commission report.

But no statistics have been kept specifically on business communication.

And it seems unlikely that a significant number of businesspeople will give up their landlines completely any time soon, given the unpredictability of cell-phone reception and other limits of wireless technology.

Instead, the status quo for businesspeople in the first decade of the new millennium is going mobile as needed without cutting the cord of their landlines.While keeping in constant phone-shot of clients, vendors and support staff is key in today's fast-paced economy backup also is important.

A dropped call from a key client, a garbled communication about billing, an accidentally deleted message those are some of the potential liabilities of relying on cell phones alone.

"I would not want to lose my landline voice mail," says Erich Schmitt, an account executive with ADT Security Systems.

Schmitt's territory runs across northern Nevada and into neighboring California and he has temporarily lost his wireless connection traveling between the Nevada border and Truckee, Calif., and in spots along Nevada 431 (Mount Rose Highway) between Reno and Lake Tahoe.

"I do like to have that backup there for people to get hold of me and leave messages," Schmitt says.

"My business card has both phone numbers."

"Wireless phones are nothing more than fancy radios," explains Travis Larson, spokesman for the Cellular and Telecommunications Internet Association, in Washington, D.C.

"That means just like when your car radio loses reception in a parking garage or going around a mountain, so, too, can a wireless phone when you go around a building or even stand under trees.

These signals are subject to interference from everything from the weather to sunspots to reflections off of buildings, and we'll never change these laws of physics.

Therefore there will always be some dead spots.

"People should understand the tradeoff between wire lines and wireless phones.

With wire lines they get 100 percent quality, because they're attached with a wire.

With wireless, they have 100 percent mobility."

That need for mobile communication in the business world is what first built up the cell-phone industry.

But wireless phones have gone beyond being solely tools for business, and now are mass-market consumer devices.

More than 60 percent of U.S.

households own at least one wireless phone, the FCC reported in its 2002 study of market conditions for commercial mobile services.

"The growth in wireless minutes in the United States has been exponential," says CTIA's Larson.

"In 2002, over 600 billion wireless minutes were used.

Compare that to just (the year) 2000, when the number was less than 350 billion minutes of use.

It's amazing growth, and many of our subscribers today are dropping their landline phones.

More than 7 million subscribers are wireless only about 5 percent of the wireless users.

Everyone is using more wireless minutes, including businesspeople."

Some wireless providers report great leaps in customers going exclusively landline- free.

Cricket Communications reported in May that its nationwide survey found that 37 percent of Cricket customers don't have regular phone service at their homes, compared to 26 percent in June 2002.

The survey also found that 56 percent of wireless-only customers were between the ages of 18 and 34, and 75 percent were single.

This trend of Gen Yers on the go paying only one phonecompany bill has been noticed by other wireless companies.

"Mostly, these (users) tend to be younger, highly mobile customers," says Jon Davies, manager of media relations for the Verizon phone company.

"I haven't seen any information that specifically addresses business customers."

The two largest stumbling blocks for consumers considering giving up their landlines and becoming wireless-only callers are high-quality in-home coverage and high-quality Internet access, according to findings in a 2003 joint study by the analyst firms PriMetrica and Ernst & Young.

"One of the chief complaints is the unreliability of wireless reception, but the wireless industry is improving its coverage areas with the growth of service," CTIA's Larson says.

"Wireless carriers continue to invest in their networks, building out and covering dead spots places where reception is poor or unavailable.

Generally it means building new cell sites, which are transmitters and receivers that can be found on top of almost anything."

While wireline companies face a competitive threat to their fixed-line business and need to counter the threat with new strategies, mobile providers must be careful not too grow too quickly and reach capacity constraints, concluded PriMetrica/Ernst & Young report author Kevin Duffy- Deno, PrimMetrica's director of analytical services.

Few wireless providers are positioned at present to invest significant capital expenditures to meet the demands of a tidal wave of new customers, Duffy-Deno added.

In the meantime, in the business world, landlines continue to be standard business equipment.

And landline companies are adapting to the business realities of the need for wireless and wired.

"We have found that landline and wireless phones are complementary services for business," says Heather Alexander, spokeswoman for SBC Communications, a main landline provider in northwest Nevada.

"Recently we developed new phone solutions available to consumer and business that include bundling wireless service as part of the phone package."

Business needs differ depending on the type and size of business, Alexander says.

"However, a landline is usually critical for most businesses.

Many businesses operate using an internal-switching system to handle call volumes, and even if volumes vary based on the size of a business for example, calls into a dentist office will be different from a bank nearly every business needs multiple lines to operate.

An exception may be a home-based business, but even then a landline is necessary for the computer or fax machine.

DSL (Digital Subscriber Line providing high-speed Internet access) is a very popular option for small and medium-size businesses and requires a landline." The reliability of staying wired is another advantage of maintaining a wired phone, Alexander says.

"Landlines are protected and have redundant systems to help keep dial-tone operational."

While ADT Security Systems salesman Schmitt, a NEXTEL subscriber, makes 90 percent of his business calls on his cell phone including two-way walkie-talkie service for calls to ADT technicians he continues to need the use of the landline back at the Reno home office.Wireless technology lags behind the wired industry's in the number of user options.

"If I could fax proposals to clients from my car, and if I had a high-speed Internet connection to go online to check e-mails and prices with a laptop, I wouldn't need a landline," Schmitt says.

"I'd just drop off contracts at the office, and that would be it."

Features such as conference calling also need to improve for the wireless industry to continue making headway in the business world, says Jeff Bowling, president and CEO of Reno-based TELXAR Corp., which services the informationtechnology needs of high-profile clients around the country.

Cell-phone service also should become less expensive to be more attractive to business users, Bowling says.

"The price in the late '90s was great.

You could get 1,000 minutes (a month) for $29.

Now that the carriers have a large subscription base, they can charge more for less.

Spread out over 1 million users, this could represent hundreds of millions of dollars per year," he says.

"Generally with technology, as you build more units and add more services, the subscription base becomes cheaper.

For cell phones I would like to see $9.99 per month for 1,000 anytime minutes."

As for quality, Bowling says the U.S.

wireless industry provides "acceptable" service.

"They have not made many great strides in the U.S.

Europe and Asia have the best service rate and reliability for service."

Even though landscape architect Breen doesn't pay for landline service for his business, he still suffers instances of cellphone frustration incomprehensible or broken conversations, and occasionally unclear voicemail messages.

"It's imperfect technology at the moment," Breen says.

"The coverage is sporadic.

You drive around this town, and it's amazing where you get into these little black holes.

I'll be on a job site and you can walk three feet in one direction and get coverage, and three feet the other way and you're done.

People in the trades are used to it.

"If people call me and I'm near a landline, I'll say, 'Hey, can I call you back on your landline?' Because it's just much better."