JOHANNESBURG-The International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU’s) formal approval of Motorola Inc.’s FLEX paging protocol as an international standard will give the green light to expand FLEX operations in Africa. This will be particularly so in South Africa, the hub of the paging industry.
One operator in the country, Radiospoor, already uses the FLEX standard. All other operators, which include three country-wide and 30 regional companies, use POCSAG technology.
“The slower POCSAG systems are hitting capacity limits, and the paging industry needs to upgrade to high-speed protocols such as FLEX,” said Lawrence Clayton, chairman of the Information Technology Association of South Africa (ITAPS).
There is little talk of introducing ERMES, the European radio messaging service, even though the South African Regulatory Authority (SATRA) in its frequency-band reallocation earmarked the 169 MHz band for this use.
“The GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) cellular industry in South Africa has been a success story,” said Clayton. “I very much doubt that ERMES as an open Pan-European standard, would follow suit. ERMES has not lived up to its expectations in Europe, and several countries have experienced interference problems. Britain for example, pulled out in favor of FLEX, which is slowly becoming a de facto standard outside Europe.”
There are speculations that the national operator, partially privatized Telkom SA, might introduce an ERMES network to provide telecommunications services in underserviced areas. But the high cost of the paging units will likely make this an unsuitable solution.
Meanwhile, industry sources believe the FLEX protocol would be a solution to uplift the paging market, which took a decisive knock when GSM cellular service was first introduced in South Africa. Businessmen swapped their pagers for cellular phones. Prepaid cellular phone cards further accelerated the paging user decline, and the number of corporate-subscription users reached an all-time low.
The introduction of calling party pays (CPP)-launched in 1997 after lengthy negotiations with Telkom, which feared misuse of the 088 number used for CPP-has helped to lift the market. This raised endless opportunities for tapping into the youth and family consumer markets. The paging industry reported a remarkable increase in calls during the 1997 end-of-the-year holiday season.
As GSM networks become more and more congested, customers are returning to paging services to complement cellular offerings. An aggressive advertising and marketing campaign continues to uplift the paging industry, which has already spent in excess of R11 million (US$2.23 million) for this purpose last year.
“We see the FLEX protocol with its high-speed protocol as the only solution to boost the industry, which we predict could reach 5-percent market penetration by the end of the millennium,” said Clayton. “Furthermore, with the upswing, the prices of pagers are likely to decrease and units will become more affordable. We foresee expanding the paging infrastructure in South Africa and using paging as an ideal communications tool for underprivileged people in rural areas.”
