NEW YORK-“A lot of what you’re hearing about voice over the Internet, about having actual, real-time conversations, is hype,” said Ralph Tomeoni, president and chief executive officer of TekNow, Phoenix.
“The Internet is a great big packet switching network, and it should be used for what it does best: real-near-time, one-way activities.”
Taking an educated guess, Tomeoni said he believes that domestic wireless carriers are handling between 1.75 million and 2.5 million messages a month over the Internet, compared with none two years ago.
Cost savings are the main reason, Tomeoni said. Operator dispatch costs about 40 cents per message. Telephone Application Programming Interface, in which a computer serves as operator, costs about 5 cents to 7 cents per message. Using the Internet costs less than 1 cent per message.
The United States today is way out in front on the use of Internet messaging, he said. A few carriers in Canada, including Bell Mobility, have adopted it.
“Europe is starting to look at it but needs a shared communications network across the whole continent,” Tomeoni said.
Latin American and Caribbean carriers likely will follow suit. In Asia, Singapore residents “are more receptive to computer-to-computer communications” than Chinese, Thais and Koreans, “who tend to be uncomfortable talking to computers,” Tomeoni said.
For people in any country who simply want to send a numeric page with a call-back number, a plain old telephone likely always will be fastest.
“But the Internet soon will eclipse every other technology. Some studies show that a person with an alphanumeric pager is four times more likely to use the Internet than someone without one,” he said.
TekNow produces the PhenX Internet Paging Gateway, which facilitates e-mail-to-pager and World Wide Web-to-pager messaging. The IPG also can run in broadband and narrowband personal communications services environments to send messages to PCS handsets. Regional Bell operating companies use the gateway for enhanced specialized mobile radio dispatch services to cellular handsets with Cellular Digital Packet Data capabilities.
“Most of the major carriers in the United States have gone with our technology … which we introduced commercially in March 1997,” Tomeoni said.
As examples of TekNow’s customers, he cited AT&T Wireless Services Inc., Ameritech Cellular Services Inc., Paging Network Inc. and American Paging Inc., recently acquired by TSR Paging Inc.
“The e-mail address is the customer’s wireless company. We take the contents and translate them into a message acceptable to the technology used by the wireless carrier,” Tomeoni said.
Through its Internet Paging Gateway, TekNow also provides a basic template carriers can customize with logos, promotions, links to other sites, etc., and then put on the Internet for access by their wireless customers. The IPG’s firewalls between networks also permit control of spam, or junk e-mail, by keeping track of the number of pages of text a customer receives and blocking overloads.
Subscribers also can control the way wireless devices, which have limited downloading capacity, receive messages. They can opt for various kinds of message alerts, while TekNow forwards the full text of the contents to an in-box for customer retrieval in a stationary environment.
