Although it has been months since AT&T Wireless Services Inc. dropped all plans for services using the personal Air Communications Technology advanced paging protocol, some talk remained about pACT Vendor Forum members seeking other customers for the technology they invested so much in.
But it was just that … talk.
As it turns out, AT&T was the only basket in which the vendor’s eggs were placed. The pACT Vendor Forum has been disbanded and all the money left in its accounts was distributed back to its members, said Ted Pielemeier, a former board member of the now defunct group.
Pager device manufacturers and infrastructure members studying pACT technology all have ceased efforts in that area. Pielemeier, new business development manager in the wireless communications division of NEC Corp., said NEC also has terminated all pACT development.
Some remained hopeful for a while, however. Ericsson Inc. briefly considered using the pACT-based infrastructure it already had created in Latin America, said Ralph Phillips, former director of mobile data at the company. But the company was unable to find a pager manufacturer that could cost-effectively produce pagers using the protocol, so the idea fell through. He said no plans exist to salvage work on the protocol.
“We cannot get the device manufacturers to commit to producing devices at a reasonable price at low volumes,” Phillips said. AT&T was the only high-volume carrier that expected to use the protocol.
As far as the existing infrastructure created for pACT, Phillips said some parts were salvaged and reused in other networks, but much of it had to be scrapped. “But it wasn’t a total waste,” he said.
As much as vendors competing with Motorola Inc. would have liked to have made infrastructure and devices based on something other than FLEX technology, all that remains of the effort is wasted money and bad blood.
“We really hated the whole thing,” said Pielemeier. “We were really looking forward to implementing that technology.”
