Mobile data applications to date have been fairly industry-specific and complicated, something many in the data industry blame for its confinement to a limited vertical market.
But mobile data network carriers Ardis and BellSouth Wireless Data Inc.-formerly RAM Mobile Data USA L.P.-believe two-way interactive text messaging will be the application that brings the mobile professional horizontal market to their door.
As things stand today, Ardis and BellSouth generate most of their revenue by providing various applications to the field service and transportation industries. They expect telemetry applications and two-way messaging to be the industry’s two largest growth opportunities.
Janet Boudris, senior vice president of strategic marketing for BellSouth Wireless Data, expects the two-way text messaging service it has planned for later this year will be its most popular offering.
“We see this as a real opportunity to bring in a large number of users across the board,” she said. “We think this will far outstrip the number of vertical customers really quickly.”
Boudris said this is true mainly because interactive paging is easier to sell.
“Interactive paging is more intuitive,” she said. “You begin to see and feel the power of what it can do. We believe it will hit a need in the marketplace.”
Key to offering service on packet radio networks was Research In Motion’s Inter@active pager.
“It was very important,” said Mike McGee, vice president of marketing and client services at Ardis. “We had the application and we had the network, but we didn’t have the device.”
In 1990, general messaging consisted of almost 35 percent of all traffic on Ardis’ network as a sub-application of other offerings. The company wanted to offer two-way messaging as a stand-alone feature, but didn’t have the proper device to do so.
“The problem was, we couldn’t isolate our focus on just that application,” McGee said. The RIM Inter@active changed that.
While Ardis and BellSouth feel the RIM pager is an effective first-generation device, they are expecting changes to it in the future. In particular, they want the overall size and price to go down, in addition to other general form-factor changes.
Paging competition
In pursuing this market, mobile data operators will compete with paging providers, many of which have committed to building out two-way ReFLEX paging networks to offer interactive two-way paging. Only Mobile Telecommunication Technologies Corp. operates a two-way paging system today. Its SkyTel network can provide interactive two-way messaging, but the company stresses 1.5-way, or guaranteed receipt, service.
Ardis and BellSouth believe their packet radio networks are better suited for two-way messaging than a ReFLEX 25 network. They point out that ReFLEX 25 is a store-and-forward technology, meaning messages are sent to the paging network, stored, encoded into the FLEX protocol and sent to the pager. Also, the return channel on a ReFLEX network is not as fast as the inbound channel, nor does it have as much capacity.
“In reality, SkyTel has a ReFLEX system that is fundamentally two networks-one going out and they had to build another one going in,” said Boudris. She said such networks do not support real-time messaging and have had problems with message initiation, responding to e-mail and garbled messages.
Ardis and BellSouth said the inbound and outbound channels on their packet radio networks are equally fast and have the same capacity. Messages sent from unit to unit on the same packet data network are received in real time, without the delay experienced with ReFLEX 25 systems.
“Our network is a single integrated network that can handle all send and receive functions,” Boudris said. “That’s our business. It’s pretty bulletproof in that regard.”
Perhaps more important, they say, is their networks are complete, running and proven. “This is here today and fully developed,” McGee said. “Ardis is the largest mobile data network in the country today. We are in more cities and towns and we give the best in-building penetration of any network.”
For these reasons, Ardis and BellSouth said they believe customers would be better off with the interactive two-way service their networks provide than that of a paging carrier’s.
This desire to provide two-way services to compete with ReFLEX networks may have been a factor in Motorola Inc.’s decision to sell its interests in Ardis to American Mobile Satellite Corp., since Motorola developed the ReFLEX technology.
“We put them in an uncomfortable position,” McGee said, acknowledging that there were some awkward conversations between Motorola and its Ardis subsidiary. “We were competing with them for potential customers.”
Paging’s response
But skeptics feel there is little chance that mobile data companies will present much of a challenge to the paging industry.
First there is the price. While the monthly service costs are comparable, the device costs are not.
“There are more people making paging devices than there are making mobile data devices,” for text messaging, said Darryl Sterling, wireless messaging analyst at The Yankee Group.
RIM is the only company that makes a pager designed to transmit and receive messages on packet radio networks. Its retail price of $500 is more than the $322 SkyTel charges for the Glenayre Technologies Inc. Wireless Access Group AccessLink or the $360 the company charges for Motorola’s PageWriter 2000.
Sterling also dismissed the speed and capacity arguments of packet radio vs. ReFLEX, saying faster message speed is not a real issue for paging users.
“What’s the worst case scenario, three minutes?” he asked, referring to the lag time in getting messages on store-and-forward networks. “Big deal. Most people don’t care.”
He disagreed that packet radio networks are better than ReFLEX for text messaging by noting that as ReFLEX 25 technology is perfected, the market will open up to more application developers who then can create more uses for it. The more functions ReFLEX 25 networks and devices can perform, the more attractive they will be to customers.
“Mobile data networks have good applications, but very distinct ones,” he said. “I think you’d get more functionality out of paging … You can do more on a paging network.”
Paging partners
As such, Sterling said he believes mobile data carriers will have to join with paging carriers if they want their networks used in this fashion.
“Who has the most success with messaging services? Paging carriers,” he said. “They know more about it than mobile data network providers. If I was a mobile data operator, I would go to carriers that don’t have a ReFLEX 25 network. Pit ReFLEX over mobile data. It will give carriers without the money to build out a ReFLEX 25 network something to compete with.”
Ardis and BellSouth intend to do just that. They know they can hardly expect to achieve the same level of customer awareness that paging carriers command, so they want to instead take advantage of that and attract paging carriers as resellers. Since the customer has little clue as to the technology behind the services they use, paging resellers unable or unwilling to build their own ReFLEX networks may opt to offer Ardis’ or BellSouth’s service and brand it as their own.
BellSouth, for instance, has entered into a resale agreement with SourceOne Wireless Inc. and is pursuing others. Ardis is pursuing similar agreements.
Naysayers
Other critics believe the interactive two-way messaging market will never take off, regardless of whether it is offered by a paging carrier on ReFLEX 25 or by a mobile data provider over packet radio.
“The two-way pager will not find broad horizontal consumer acceptance,” said Bob Lansey, presid
ent of DTS Wireless Inc. “I think there’s a tremendous large use in vertical markets … But I think it will fall short of being an e-mail replacement.”
DTS is a wireless Internet e-mail and messaging service provider. Its Zap-It Wireless InBox service allows customers to connect to the Internet via a laptop or a palmtop equipped with a wireless modem to send and receive e-mail and faxes.
Lansey’s argument is that paging devices, whether the RIM Inter@active or the PageWriter 2000, are simply too small to compose messages on, don’t allow for longer messages and can’t have desktop-received e-mail forwarded to them without an ancillary software program, like Microsoft Exchange.
Lansey said he believes that paging and mobile data carriers are misleading customers by marketing interactive two-way messaging as wireless e-mail.
“It isn’t really e-mail. When people think e-mail, they think of paragraphs of text, not a few words,” he said. “As e-mail becomes more ubiquitous and as the workplace becomes more mobile, the worker wants his desktop e-mail-not another e-mail address-but his desktop e-mail address on a mobile device.”
The current interactive two-way services require a separate e-mail address. “I’m not saying there’s not room for that,” Lansey said. “I’m saying that’s not e-mail. It’s not meaningful messaging.”
This type of criticism points to the view that two-way carriers’ biggest adversary at this point is not each other, but lack of awareness about their products. Whatever competition exists at this time between paging carriers and mobile data carriers for two-way customers can only help jump start the fledgling interactive two-way messaging market. The more interactive two-way messaging providers there are, the more voices there are talking about the service’s benefits.
“There is no one solution for the marketplace,” McGee said. “There are 24 million mobile professionals out there, according to a Yankee Group report. I think there’s plenty of space for everybody.
“The challenge is how to build awareness to help explain the value,” he continued. “We all need to help define and energize this space. We’ve got to develop this space. That’s our main competition.”
