San Diego Gets Cellular Telephones--at Last

San Diego on Thursday became the last of the nation’s 30 largest cities to be wired for cellular automobile phones after phone owners got the official green light from PacTel Mobile Access to start dialing.

Unofficially, the system was turned on Tuesday for 500 customers who had been waiting months to make their first calls from the phones, which have been called everything from toys to economic tools--sometimes in the same breath. The cellular phones provide better fidelity than the old system for remote phones and are designed to handle an unlimited numbers of users. The “cells” that give the system its name are transceivers scattered over a service area. They allow users to call numbers directly rather than using one central operator and radio frequency.

PacTel officials said most of their customers are businessmen who spend a lot of their time on the road --building contractors, for example--or who just want to make better use of their time. Officials said they expect to sign up 2,000 San Diego customers in the first year of operation and 21,000 in the first five years.

“San Diego is made up of a mobile society,” said company president Philip J. Quigley. “They’re in their car and on their feet, they’re doing things. Now you’ve got mobile phone access when you’re doing things.”

That access costs $35 a month, plus 40 cents a minute for each call made between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. and 24 cents a minute at other times and on weekends. The start-up fee is $50. The phones themselves, which generally have a 10- to 30-number memory, cost $1,500 for a basic automobile model and $2,500 for one that can be carried anywhere.

Despite the cost, about 30,000 customers in the Los Angeles-Orange County metropolitan area have signed up with PacTel since June, 1984, more than double the company’s original projections.

Unlike Los Angeles, San Diego officials were suspicious enough of the aesthetics of the cellular phone system’s 130-foot radio antennas to require an environmental impact report before PacTel could construct its equipment sites in Encanto, Clairemont and Southeast San Diego. A PacTel official said the report, also required by Santee and La Mesa, held up the project by six months.

The system still is not complete; it now covers 525 square miles as far north as Sorrento Valley, east to La Mesa and south to the Mexican border. PacTel plans to expand the system to more than 13,000 square miles, including Oceanside, Escondido and a connection to the Los Angeles system. Three additional antenna sites have been approved. PacTel also expects competition from another company within a year.