
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 1, 1994                   TAG: 9403020220
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: C-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

SUPERPHONES GET CLOSER STILL

The day when you will be able to send faxes and electronic mail from a mobile telephone whose number goes where you go moved a crucial step closer Monday.

MCI Communications Corp. said it is going into the wireless communications business.

The nation's No. 2 long-distance company said it will invest $1.3 billion to buy a 17 percent stake in little-known Nextel Communications. The alliance will mean consumers will be able to use the same mobile phone and phone number anywhere in the country.

Nextel Chairman Morgan O'Brien said that within two years 95 percent of the country's population will have access to the new service, delivered over radio frequencies.

MCI said the alliance gives it a leg up into the next generation of mobile communications services, but competitors disputed that. They said they are closing in on that goal.

MCI's biggest rival is AT&T, which has plans to acquire the nation's largest cellular company, McCaw Cellular Communications.

The wireless-communications market, chiefly mobile-phone service, is expected to grow from 15 million customers to as many as 90 million customers in 10 years, fueled by paging, messaging and other data-transmission services, Roberts said.

Nextel's licenses cover 45 of the top 50 markets, O'Brien said. Its operation in Los Angeles is already up and running. Service to the rest of California and to New York, Chicago, Dallas and Houston should be in operation by mid-1995, he said.

Unlike its competitors, the venture will not depend on getting radio frequencies from the FCC, because Nextel already has them. The FCC is scheduled to begin auctioning radio frequencies for personal-communications service in May

\ HOW IT WORKS:\ \ Telephone calls could be delivered through a mix of wireless technology - radio signals - and wired technology, such as fiber optic, coaxial cable and copper wires.\ \ If a call is made within a single city or other small geographic area, it will travel on radio frequencies relayed by transmission towers.\ \ If a call is made over a long distance, say from Washington to Los Angeles, it will travel on radio signals, bypassing the local telephone company. It will be picked up by MCI and carried on its long-distance lines, then handed off to radio frequencies as it approaches Los Angeles.

by CNB