Tech Advances Pay Off For Carnival Industry.

Several carnival owners feel that the advent of the cellular phone has been a godsend to the communications of the amusement industry. In the days before cellular phones, a show had to call the phone company to have a line turned on each time it traveled to a different spot. If the phones did get turned on in time, the show paid for the whole month, even though it used the line for much less than that. “The phones rarely were on when you got to the spot,” said John Tolve of Lyndhurst, New Jersey-based Tolve Presentations. Applications of cellular phones have included a full range of solutions that benefit the traveling amusement industry, including integrated voice and mobile data and a reliable and seamless network that can significantly improve the show's bottom line. The phones offer wireless processes for e-mail, timesheets, scheduling, and dispatching among other things. Cellular phones with Internet access take it one step further, allowing the user to check everything from the weather to electronic mail.