geoff@fernwood.mpk.ca.us (the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow) (05/08/91)
the final, hard-copy edited version) on Anterior that has been mailed
today. Some people will be getting the article tomorrow, but most
will receive it beginning Monday. This issue of Mobile Data Report
is being shipped to our mobile data conference on Monday and Tuesday,
so the story will get more exposure.
PC, RF Companies
Testing E-Mail
Gateway Service
A small Silicon Valley company wants to be the country's leading
"middleman" connecting electronic mail networks with mobile
communications systems. Anterior Technology in Menlo Park, Calif.
isn't well known on the East Coast and has only five employees, but
it's talking to such big names as Pactel Paging, Poqet Computer,
Skytel and Ardis to test wireless e-mail services.
The founder and president of Anterior, Geoffrey Goodfellow, is
one of the few people who are familiar with both computer and mobile
communications. He established Anterior in 1988 to provide e-mail
and electronic communications hub services. So far, his primary
customers include corporations that want to connect their local area
networks (LAN) with other LANs via Internet.
Internet is a major online network serving educational and
research institutions. It's not like the relatively slow public e-
mail networks and the "ante" to go on line is generally more
expensive. For example, Internet subscribers usually generally lease
lines for transmission speeds of 56,000 bits/second or 1,440,000
bits/second (T1), say Goodfellow. The leased lines and higher-speed
modems are expenses many companies can't justify, which is why they
use Anterior.
Anterior has one 56,000 bits/second leased line and will be
leasing another one. The company also has a rack of 10 Telebit
Trailblazer modems operating at 19,200 bits/second. Well known
software companies, such as Oracle and Autodesk, along with "one-room
consultancies," primarily in the San Francisco Bay area use
Anterior's gateway services, says Goodfellow. Anterior also provides
gateway services to such e-mail networks are MCI Mail, AT&T Easylink
Services and Telemail.
Recently, some mobile communications companies have been testing
electronic mail integration over Anterior. The Menlo Park firm
receives the messages, formats them and sends them over such networks
as Pactel, Skytel and Ardis. E-mail transmissions over wireless
networks certainly is not a new topic, but there has been a
significant increase in interest by paging operators.
The nationwide paging company, Skytel, has been testing with
Anterior for almost two months, says Jai Bhagat, executive vice
president and a director at Mobile Telecommunication Technologies,
Skytel's parent company. So far, the tests seem to be going well,
but Skytel hasn't decided what to do it the tests are successful,"
Bhagat.
Last month, Skytel announced that the Federal Communications
Commission would allow the company to implement a second nationwide
900 MHz channel. Skytel has some 93,000 pagers on its original
channel, but only a handful--perhaps 100--are alphanumeric.
The problem of spectrum congestion is the overriding factor.
With a second channel, Skytel is exploring a variety of enhanced data
services. The company also hopes that the speed of current paging
systems, 1,200 bits/second, will be increased four or five times
within the next few years.
Will high-speed pagers be able to work on the same channel as
today's units? "That's the million dollar question," says Bhagat.
Today, pagers at 512 bits/second and 1,200 bits/second can operate on
the same channel.
Goodfellow has been testing ten Motorola Advisor pagers for e-
mail transmissions. The Advisor is "too complicated...it has too
many buttons," he says. Goodfellow's not the only person who's
criticized the Advisor for being overly complicated, but the Advisor
is one of slickest pagers on the market.
Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corp. and ON Technology
and chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is using one of
the ten pagers.
The packet-switched RF operators, such as Ardis and Ram Mobile
Data, have been interested in the the concept since their companies
were established. Ardis has held "first preliminary discussions with
Geoff", and will be signing up Anterior as a software developer, says
Mike Fabri, a marketing manager at Ardis in Lincolnshire, Ill.
Ardis will begin testing his system this year, Fabri says.
(sidebar)
Goodfellow's Passions
Goodfellow has been interested in computing and mobile
communications since his high school days, and is one of the
relatively few people who are familiar with both types of networks.
He dropped out of high school during his senior year to take a jpb as
a weekend computer operator at Stanford Research, Inc. (SRI) in 1974.
He began using electronic mail system (Arpanet) since he was 17, and
spent lots of time hanging around SRI during his school days.
Goodfellow was a member of the senior research staff at SRI's
Computer Science Laboratory. He became interested in wireless
communications some 20 years ago when he saw a picture of a prototype
Motorola Dynatac portable cellular phone in the cover of Popular
Science.
When he was in Hawaii in 1974 he used a Texas Instruments Silent
700 acoustically-coupled terminal transmitting at 300 baud, and
borrowed an Aloha packet radio to access his e-mail at SRI in
California. In 1981, he began using the Metragram alphanumeric pager
and always thought of it as an extension of his electronic mailbox.
While American Radio Telephone Service (ARTS) first started
testing cellular in the Baltimore/Washington, D.C. area, he wrangled
a tour of its Columbia, Md. facility through a friend of his in the
Pentagon, Goodfellow began friendly with the ARTS engineering staff,
and in the early 1980s he was able to borrow some of the first
Motorola Dynatac's to use when he visited Washington for SRI. (ARTS
was granted the first non-wireless cellular license and is now known
as Cellular One).
When ARTS started commercial operation in 1984, he ordered a
$4,000 Dynatac sent to him via overnight mail--even though he was
based in Menlo Park and no cellular service was even available.
Goodfellow just wanted to have the phone to use when in Washington.
Through ARTS, he knew Andrew H. Lamothe, Jr., who helped design
the early system. Goodfellow left SRI in 1986, and for three months
in 1986 worked at Cellular Radio Corp., which Lamothe established.
Goodfellow also worked on cellular roaming/handoff standards.
He is co-author of The Hacker's Dictionary: A Guide to the World
of Computer Wizards.
-------