Pocket Pagers Still Alive And Beeping
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday December 30, 1997
Mobile phones look cool, say the kids, but the bills they generate can burn a hole in any parent's bank account. The pocket pager - the former techno-trophy scorned by the cellular phone generation - is making a triumphant return from stage left.
But this time the pager talks back. The new "two-way pager" developed by a North Sydney company allows the owner to send a reply composed from a programmed library of 128 messages, combining phrases such as "I'll be home" with "in one hour".
"They appeal very much to a family whose children are starting to get out and about on weekends," says Mr Craig Taylor, the sales and marketing manager for TagNet.
"Everyone just wants to keep in touch, but they find all those mobile phone calls are getting very expensive."
Because each pager has a unique Internet e-mail address, its owners can also receive and respond to messages of up to 400 characters sent from most personal computers.
While some two-way pagers in the United States include tiny keyboards on which users can tap full messages, they use an expensive purpose-built data radio network rather than the 148MHz paging band already established throughout Australia.
TagNet joined forces with the Korean electronics giant, Samsung, and the US telecommunications company, Nexus, to develop the network which spans the greater Sydney district, south to Wollongong, west to the Blue Mountains and north to Gosford. Base stations in Newcastle, Melbourne and Canberra will come online throughout next year.
The underlying technology has attracted a high degree of overseas interest. Singapore Telecom will unveil a two-way paging network based on TagNet in February, reports Mr Taylor, with Webs in Moscow and New York being installed mid next year.
"We've also had people from Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur visiting to see first-hand how it works," he said.
The pager's ability to transmit signals to a network of base stations could lead to future applications in security monitoring, home automation and vehicle location, such as tracking stolen cars or co-ordinating job allocation among a fleet of service vans.
At $495 a unit and $20 a month for connection to the TagNet system, the pagers are initially more expensive than conventional receive-only pagers and mobile phones, but they can return a running cost that is substantially lower than a cellular phone.
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald
