It is said that when you provide a valuable service at a fair price, you’ll always have customers. Such is the personality of paging.
In the last year more than ever, the industry has recognized that two-way paging and other wireless services, feature-rich as they may be, likely will not abate core one-way paging in all its simplicity. While a pager can’t do it all, it does exactly what it needs to-no more or no less-for a lot of people. On scores of cost, coverage, size and battery life, one-way continues to attract healthy demand.
Consolidation headlines the pace of the paging industry in recent months. Many big players also have taken their stock public. Paul Kagan & Associates reported the top 12 paging carriers comprised two-thirds of total U.S. subscribers at the end of last year, up from 47 percent at the end of 1994.
Some wireless companies are pursuing specialization and niche marketing, while others, like Ron Lipof, president of Arch Nationwide Paging, believe the current growth period is the time to concentrate on providing better service overall.
Undermining industry progress is the paging freeze put in place in February by the Federal Communications Commission, which restricts expansion by local and regional operators. Also on the FCC agenda is market-based licensing, which implies auctions. As the coals are still hot from the C-block personal communications services auction, it goes without saying auctions create controversy.
Two-way advanced messaging forges ahead promising benefit for those wanting two-way communications. In the mobile data world, specifically telemetry, the possibilities for two-way are numerous.
Still, two-way walks a narrow line between retaining the size and cost features that make a pager desirable, while adding the messaging capabilities customers want. Pushed too far, some capabilities could threaten the usefulness of the medium. If a pager gets too big, why not get a phone? If features are too rich and numerous, might would-be customers turn away? And might carriers lose money from inefficient use of network capacity?
SkyTel Corp. has sustained a bittersweet debut in two-way messaging. Despite a first-to-market advantage, the company’s ReFLEX-based service has suffered a few problems, the significance of which analysts from the wireless industry to Wall Street disagree.
Advances in one-way and two-way paging technology have been highly newsworthy with two new standards entering the marketplace. Motorola Inc.’s FLEX technology, which offers several enhancements-namely capacity-from current one-way de facto standard POCSAG, is rapidly infiltrating worldwide markets, while AT&T Corp.’s pACT standard seeks to find its place in the two-way messaging world.
At year-end 1995, paging units in service topped about 34 million, according to Economic & Management Consultants International Inc., up from 27 million a year earlier. The industry is expected to add another 5 million users this year, said EMCI. Total revenue corresponds to the growth, despite lower revenue per unit.
