Paging Network Inc.’s Internet gateway experienced sporadic outages over a space of 30 hours late last month, during which customers nationwide were unable to receive text messages sent from an e-mail address. The Internet gateway went down on a Wednesday evening and was up and down, although mostly down, until Friday morning, according to Scott Baradell, PageNet director of corporate communications. When down, customers sending text messages from their e-mail address, or from the “Send a Message” e-mail paging function on PageNet’s Web site, were unable to get their messages through to pagers. According to Baradell, an equipment failure on the gateway caused the problem. He said the equipment had been tested previously and its failure was unanticipated. The company has fixed the problem and is in the process of adding additional redundancies. Traffic on PageNet’s Internet gateway has tripled in the last year, from just fewer than 1 million messages a month to about 3 million.
Motorola Inc.’s Messaging Systems Products Group announced version 2.0 of its FLEXsuite protocols, increasing the functionality of any one- and two-way paging applications based on a FLEX, ReFLEX or InFLEXion protocol-based network. The new version extends such applications as security and authentication, which encrypts messages during transmission; text compression, which reduces messages by 40 percent during transmission; wireless e-mail; generic over-the-air-programming to make changes to a pager’s parameters over the air; and routing to forward messages to other wireless or wireline devices. Motorola said it is giving the 35 FLEXsuite version 1.0 licensees an opportunity to review pre-release copies of the version 2.0 specification document before its final release.
Comsat Corp. last week filed a lawsuit against three former employees of Comsat Mobile Corp., alleging they “misappropriated confidential, sensitive and proprietary business information and purposefully and systematically destroyed computer files” prior to their resignations. Comsat provides satellite services and digital networking services and technologies.
