There is little doubt that the telecommunications industry has taken on a global hue. Increasingly, American wireless providers are teaming up with foreign companies to expand their service portfolios across the world.
As communications technologies enter these alien markets, it is interesting to see how a technology shared by several cultures can be used so differently.
A wireless service that amplifies such cultural diversity is paging. Talking, whether on the phone or in person, is for the most part natural, but responding to a page is not something people automatically know how to integrate.
“There are about as many different flavors to this as there are countries and cultures,” said Rick Nelson, president of PageMart International. “Communications, as a tool, must meet the needs of a population,” he continued. Paging is “a very flexible and conforming means of communication.”
Asia is the world’s largest paging market and several cultural characteristics there show how paging services can be manipulated to fit a population’s needs. Getting a phone line in Asia is an arduous task. Citizens must either wait for years or fork over significant bribe money to get a phone line installed. Paging is a cheap, easy and popular communications alternative.
Almost too popular, sometimes. In almost any given restaurant, public transportation system, or movie theater, it is impossible to avoid the cacophony of chiming pagers.
Responding to a page is considered obligatory in many Asian countries. In China, business travelers have reported hearing sometimes extravagant excuses for not returning a page (such as “I broke my leg”). But the lack of wireline phones that has made paging so popular also hinders the service, as returning pages can be difficult. Both the sender and the receiver must somehow gain access to a phone to send or return a numeric page. As such, it is not unusual to see several Chinese people huddled around a pay phone, all jumping toward it at once when it rings, expecting their return call.
Understandably, alphanumeric paging can somewhat solve this problem. But only recently were paging devices manufactured that could display the complex characters used in the Asian writing system. In China, paging subscribers have adopted a code system using a mysterious relationship between letters and numbers-like C3 for Ma or 4I for Liu-that even the Chinese themselves can’t explain. There are even code books for sale for users to create and translate messages.
Codes also are used in Latin America, another popular paging market, but in a somewhat different way. During high call volume hours, customers in Latin America are asked not to use the operator-assisted alpha dispatch for basic text messages. Mobitel, among others, issues a code book that senders can use to enter a numeric code that then is translated into a canned alphanumeric message so the reader need not decode. Alpha operators are then freed to dispatch the longer, more complicated alpha messages.
Perhaps more unusual about the Latin American market though, is that about 97 percent of all paging services there are alphanumeric, while in the United States, only about 12 percent are alphanumeric.
Why the disparity? “In these cultures, there is an expectation of sending complete messages, not waiting for a call back,” said PageMart’s Nelson. “They’re a highly communicative group, very expressive. An alphanumeric page is better than a matter-of-fact numeric page.”
Bohdan Pyskir, Latin American director for Motorola Inc.’s Advanced Paging Group, explained further. “Latinos aren’t as prone as Americans to return a call from a number they don’t recognize,” he said. Unlike China, not responding to a numeric page is commonplace.
Also interesting is the kind of text messages sent. In America, text messages tend to be very direct and brief. Not so in Latin America.
“It’s part of their culture to send expressive messages and some are incredibly long,” Nelson said. An average message is up to 90 to 120 characters.
These longer messages are a result of the more formal Spanish language and the cultural way of communicating, sometimes referred to as “Latin color.” For instance, a message to call the office would be something like: “Hello. I hope things are going well for you. Please call the office when you have time, no emergency, and say hello to your wife for me.”In the states, that message becomes “Call office.”
“There’s a lot of courtesy and formality in their communication,” Pyskir said. “It’s maybe unfortunate, but that’s something we’ve lost in the U.S.”
Learning to cope with such cultural differences is a worthwhile activity for paging carriers, since the global market for paging is expected to increase. Paging’s low costs, high coverage potential and flexible nature make it a suitable technology to act as a front man for the wireless industry in any virgin market, industry insiders say.
Paging has the potential to be the one method of wireless communications that can seamlessly function beyond borders. A businessman who owns a wireless phone using one technology may not be able to make calls in a country that uses a different standard.
“It’s my opinion that messaging stands to be in a very unique position to be the glue to hold a number of different communication areas together,” said Nelson. “So if people need to get a hold of you, you’re still very much in touch without having to change services, and at a more than affordable cost.”
