BUCHAREST, Romania-Until recently, the dominant system in European paging was POCSAG. POCSAG paging networks, designed and installed 20 years ago, are now significantly overloaded and have reached the end of their economic lives.
Beginning in 1994, a new standard, ERMES, was implemented in some European paging markets. In the future, ERMES will be a true competitor to the U.S.-born FLEX system from Motorola through the introduction of two-way paging and interconnection with notebook computers through a Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA) standard interface.
Currently, 15 commercial
ERMES networks operate in Europe and three in the Middle East.
An additional two newcomers will be Croatian Telecom and Greece’s OTE, which plan to launch commercial ERMES service.
These two, together with existing ERMES networks in the Czech Republic and Hungary, strengthen ERMES’ position as the preferred standard for Eastern Europe.
“We decided to implement an ERMES service primarily because it is an open standard, defined by
ETSI, and is designed to offer a long-term paging solution,” said Vjekoslav Maric, ERMES manager for Croatian Telecom. “It has already had considerable success in Eastern Europe, and the facility to operate a successful, high-speed paging [system with] international roaming was … an added attraction.”
Even with the new success, the ERMES standard is not viewed well by Central European operators.
The majority consider the expense too high for making the switch from POCSAG to ERMES. Added to that, prices for GSM services continue to drop, making cellular a rival technology to ERMES.
Two-way transmission, roaming and lower fees thus will have to be key selling features.
Until now, just a handful of operators in the region have adopted ERMES, and industry observers don’t expect an explosion of new networks in the near future. Operators from Eastern European countries experiencing economic problems, such as Bulgaria, Slovenia, Romania and Slovakia, probably will not adopt the ERMES standard.
The problem is that the operators must launch new services at lower prices to compete with cellular for target markets, such as teenagers and even children.
