Students at the University of Central Arkansas are about to get access to new cellular voice service on campus offered by multiple carriers, thanks to an unusual set of technology and financial incentives put together by school officials and IBM Corp.

Cingular Wireless LLC began offering cellular service for the 300-acre campus in Conway last month and will expand the coverage this week, partly by installing several additional indoor antennas, said Kip Turner, director of RF engineering for Cingular"s Arkansas and Oklahoma region.

In addition, service from Alltel Corp. in Little Rock is scheduled to be available on campus within four weeks, IBM and school officials said.

UCA appears to be the first school in the U.S. to tie together technology and financial incentives, said Michael Sisto, executive consultant for emerging broadband solutions at IBM.

UCA is relying partly on a network of smaller indoor antennas to bring service inside buildings, something done fairly often in private settings such as hotels and malls, Sisto said.

The school is trying to solve a common problem with its cellular service: bringing wireless WAN coverage inside large concrete and metal buildings where radio signals are easily disrupted, according to IBM and school officials. The methods involve using conventional outdoor cellular antennas in addition to distributed antennas indoors. In addition, UCA is allowing carriers to compete on campus under an arrangement called third-party neutral hosting (TPNH), said Ron Toll, dean of the college of natural sciences and mathematics at UCA.

TPNH setups are used in resorts and airports, but such arrangements haven"t been tried at colleges, said Toll.

With Cingular and Alltel already on board, UCA is now negotiating with five other carriers for cellular service on campus. The goal is to offer students a variety of choices -- and generate revenues for the school. "We didn"t want to get into the cell phone business," Toll said. "We are providing access to a 10,000-student customer base," which gives the carriers an incentive to offer service.

UCA is offering a network backbone to the carriers and has agreed to build two exterior antennas and about 25 interior ones in all, he said. Without offering financial details, Toll said UCA is giving carriers long-term leases under which the carriers will pay monthly fees to the university. The revenue generated will be used to support other wireless initiatives, such as the purchase of wireless-enabled laptops due to be rolled out in 2006.

The university is spending about US$1 million on the distributed antenna system and has spent "several millions" with IBM on network infrastructure improvements in recent years, Toll said. The school expects to achieve a return on its multimillion-dollar investment in 36 to 42 months, Toll said.

As wireless use becomes more common on campus, Toll said, more educational uses of the technology may emerge, including the ability to control a 15-foot LED screen that would be used as a kind of electronic bulletin board for the campus. An increase in the number of wireless laptops will also mean the school will need fewer fixed computer labs.

"It"s an example of a university stepping out and taking a little bit of a leadership role," Toll said. "We didn"t want a bunch of cellular towers to pop up around campus." The school has also saved resources by running the new backbone supporting the distributed antennas alongside new Wi-Fi access point cables.

For Cingular, the approach made sense "At UCA, we and other carriers had pretty much saturated coverage with the traditional approach," Turner said. "We view this as an opportunity to increase capacity and coverage on campus."