Southern CEO Optimistic Despite Mounting Challenges

LAS VEGAS — A rough economy and growing competition from national wireless carriers such as Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc. has meant challenging times for the industry's smaller players, companies that often serve rural areas.

One of those carriers is Atlanta-based SouthernLINC Wireless, which has about 275,000 business, government and consumer customers within a 128,000 square-mile area that includes parts of Alabama, Georgia, southeastern Mississippi and the Florida Panhandle.

SouthernLINC is the communications arm of Southern Co., which owns four Southeastern electric utilities, including Georgia Power. The carrier prides itself on a network often used for public safety and built to endure hurricanes and other extreme weather.

At this week's CTIA Wireless industry convention here, SouthernLINC Wireless CEO Bob Dawson discussed in an interview the changing world of wireless and the challenges faced by his company and rural carriers:

Q: How is the slowing economy affecting your business?

A: When we go and look at our commercial business with small businesses, they're coming to us and turning off a radio (handset) or two because they're having to let people go because their business is slow. I think people have less disposable income when they're trying to fill up the truck to get to work. ...

There's going to come a crunch when a lot of mobile devices will not be on their top list of things to pay. We see the economy as one of the things we're competing against and we try to price our products so that people have options to use us in a way that they can manage in their budget.

Q: With competition for rural wireless users increasing, do you still have any markets to yourself?

A: In a few places — and they are becoming fewer — we are the only option. We compete against probably the most number of carriers anywhere.

We compete in different parts of our territory where a large national would be. One in the east, another in the west, somebody in the middle. They started in the urban areas, came down the Interstates ... but they still don't go out beyond the city as we do.

Q: With that increasing competition, how does SouthernLINC make itself stand out?

A: One thing that sets us apart from the others is you can actually get customer service and you can get it from people that are local to you. You're not dialing outside of your footprint to some "you don't know where." You can actually call the president and CEO of SouthernLINC and talk to him. And I don't have as much screening going on around me as some of the carriers I've tried to call. ...

We have a hardened system, so if you want to talk in the worst of times, we're your best bet. Now the problem we have is when the sky is blue and the wind is gentle and string and two cans would work for you, people can be lured away.

What we've seen is that when they're lured away with price or promises, they tend to come back after a while saying "we missed what we got from you."

Q: So how is your number of customers holding up?

A: We saw that there's at least three different competitors that built out in three different parts of the market that were starting to eat into customers.

A lot of this thing is about buzz and hype. Whether it's real or imagined or just feels good, people tend to go to that because it's new. And if the new doesn't fit their needs, then they tend to go back to what's tried and true.

So right now I'd say we're running along flat. Clearly you need to turn it up because growth talks about the future.

Q: You've said that your business is limited by a lack of data roaming, the ability of your customers to use wireless data services such as weather and e-mail on the networks of other carriers. What have you been doing to change that?

A: We have been asking for and have pushed at the Federal Communications Commission to get data roaming because a lot of our customers are rural and nobody else covers them.

We'd asked for (the FCC) to make it mandatory like voice and push-to-talk. ... It's not just us, but it's the other rural carriers in the country who are hearing from the larger carriers and are being told no on 3G, 4G (high-speed) data roaming.

On the Web:

SouthernLINC: southernlinc.com