After three years in Motorola Inc.’s Information Systems Group and 23 years with the company, Frank Lloyd has returned to paging, his mind set on growing international markets and advancing voice paging and two-way messaging.
Lloyd is senior vice president and general manager of Motorola’s Messaging Systems Products Group, a seat vacated by Hector Ruiz, who now heads Motorola’s semiconductor products division. Lloyd previously led the ISG.
“We’ve seen a lot of changes in paging,” said Lloyd. The industry has grown from “a relatively small U.S. business to a very exciting global business. I’m bullish on paging because of some of the opportunities going on around the world.”
Lloyd said the Motorola division is building a global operation with a regional focus. The company’s philosophy is “to put our engineers where the market is,” added Lloyd. Various elements of pager design, engineering and production take place in India, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Singapore and China, and soon in Brazil, as well as the United States.
It is important “not just to work closely with customers to design pagers, but to be able to deliver products locally,” noted Lloyd.
Paging growth is phenomenal in Asia, and Latin America-still a fresh market-showed the highest percent growth in the world last year, said Lloyd. Motorola is just starting to scratch the service in Russia, where the FLEX one-way protocol recently was adopted. Growth rates across Eastern Europe including Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltic States, are comparable to those in Latin America. Most of the demand in these regions is for alphanumeric service.
“Forty percent of the world’s population has less than 1 percent penetration” in paging, added Lloyd.
In Africa, where the paging market is wide open, Lloyd expects advanced paging services to drive quickly into the market. Where there has been almost no investment in paging to date, operators can jump ahead and deploy state-of-the-art systems.
Western Europe has posed a greater challenge for paging. As with Global System for Mobile communications cellular technology, the European Union has recommended using the European Radio Messaging Standard for paging. ERMES has made little progress, due in part to operators’ emphasis on the GSM cellular market and because of interference problems ERMES incurs with other networks, including TV broadcasting.
But the mind-set in Western Europe is starting to change, said Lloyd. He said FLEX is gaining a toehold in Germany, one of the most advanced cellular markets, and the protocol could be in a few European countries this year.
“France Telecom has taken a hard look at paging in the last year,” said Lloyd. The company’s Tattoo product is a POCSAG-based device targeted at younger people as an economical way to communicate. Calling-party-pays paging also is gaining increased attention across Europe, added Floyd.
In the United States, MSPG’s attention is on narrowband personal communications services. “Voice is still the best way to get across a tremendous amount of information,” said Lloyd. “People have been telling us for years, `give us back our voice services.’ “
Prior to the development of InFLEXion technology, voice paging did not make sense economically and so never took off. The company’s Tenor pager uses InFLEXion.
In addition to voice, MSPG is focused on creating products that offer greater access to services people want, like the Internet, but which are tethered services today.
“One of the things I bring back to paging is information from the data group,” noted Lloyd. “By tying paging into some of these services, we’re enabling added value.”
PageWriter, an advanced ReFLEX product expected to be available in the next several months, offers a keyboard and two-way data capability. Software companies are developing lateral applications to PageWriter, said Lloyd. He expects the initial take on PageWriter to be in vertical markets.
One of the greatest pushes in rolling out narrowband PCS is the incremental increased revenue per subscriber companies stand to make on those services, added Lloyd.
The MSPG, based in Fort Worth, Texas, consists of the Advanced Messaging Group, Paging Products Group, Derivative Technologies and the Core Technology Systems Division.
