Word: cellular
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Although an experimental cellular system has operated in the Chicago area since 1978, it is chiefly the breakup of the Bell System that is making cellular technology take off. Under the terms of the Jan. 1 divestiture, the seven new regional companies responsible for local phone service won the right to enter the mobile-telephone business. Each is pumping as much as $20 million into its cellular efforts...
...most likely customers are executives and salespeople who have been unable to get mobile phones because of the limited capacity of the old systems. Says Katie Harriss, an executive with Ameritech in Chicago, the first company to offer cellular service: "All the sales we've had so far are from the pent-up demand that already existed." Ameritech has been operating its network only since October and has 6,500 customers. It expects to have twice as many by December...
...There is usually also a onetime $50 charge to buy a number, a $35 monthly service fee and a charge of 400 per minute for prime business-hour calls. But users do not mind. Says Washington Real Estate Broker Dee Carl: "In my business, I can pay for a cellular phone in one deal...
Lower prices, though, may be just ahead. To encourage competition, the FCC has also authorized non-Bell companies to provide cellular transmission in 30 large market areas, and about 1,000 firms, including Metromedia and GTE, are competing for licenses in smaller cities. All are expected to fight for customers by lowering prices...
...final scene, where poor Tom Rakewell, insane at last, finds himself in Bedlam. The wall is covered with graffiti, each one a quotation from Hogarth, and in front of it the chorus of lunatics is housed in a stack of boxes, splayed in false perspective, a feverish metaphor of cellular confinement...