PageMart Wireless Inc. has announced it will be the next carrier to offer acknowledgement paging using its own network, joining SkyTel Corp.’s 2-Way Network.
“We’re going to have the second NPCS (Narrowband Personal Communications Services) network,” said Wayne Stargardt, PageMart’s vice president of marketing. “We figure we’ll launch early enough to stake out a competitive niche.”
The company currently has a ReFLEX 25 network overlay on existing one-way networks in Austin, Fort Worth and Dallas, Texas, but cannot offer commercial service until commercial-level software and appropriate subscriber unit devices become available.
“We expect all that stuff to move into commercial release this quarter,” Stargardt said. “We’re going to launch with one-and-a-half-way initially and will be limited by subscriber devices as much as anything else,” before moving into full interactive two-way. Stargardt said he expects PageMart will launch a full two-way interactive service by the end of the year.
“When we bring each market up, wherever that is, the NPCS network will have the same footprint as the one-way network in that market,” he said. That’s because the NPCS network will be an add on return channel network overlay. “We don’t have to build a new network.”
PageMart also plans to offer exclusive features with the service that will allow users to connect with the Internet, corporate intranets, specialized databases, news services and information feeds.
The company further solidified its intention to build an NPCS network when it announced a $225 million stock offering through Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. A portion of the proceeds from the issue will be used to help fund the initial construction of an NPCS network, the company said.
We can expect to see more carriers ante up to the two-way game in the near future. Because current one-way operators can add a network overlay to migrate to two-way relatively cheaply, paging companies are expected to either build their own two-way network or resell the airtime of another. MobileMedia Communications Corp. recently announced its intention to build out its NPCS licenses, despite being in Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructuring. A Yankee Group report last year predicted that American Paging Inc. and AirTouch Paging also will roll out service this year.
Stargardt said every paging operator will have to operate some kind of two-way service to compete because of the added capacity and lower pricing two-way networks enable.
