AT&T Wireless Services Inc.’s Advanced Messaging Division introduced two new services last week-a guaranteed delivery service and a nationwide paging alternative.
The first, called AlphaTrack, is a guaranteed-messaging service reselling SkyTel Communications Inc.’s ReFLEX 50 network airtime. This is the second major resale agreement for SkyTel in recent weeks and gave its stock price a needed jolt. The company’s stock was experiencing a three-month slide-from a high of $25 in June to $13.62 Aug. 14. The stock leapt about $5 last week to about $18 at press time.
Just prior to the AlphaTrack announcement, Paging Network Inc. introduced a two-way messaging service, also through resale agreements with the company. SkyTel said the new resale activity should aid its goal of achieving positive net income in the fourth quarter.
Like other guaranteed messaging services, Alphatrack stores messages for up to 72 hours if a user’s pager is off or out of service, and sends the message when the pager becomes available. Subscribers also may call in and listen to stored messages for up to four days.
The PreferredCity service is a lower-cost nationwide paging alternative that allows subscribers to specify in which city outside their local coverage areas they would like messages redirected for a certain time. The service costs less than full nationwide coverage because messages are redirected only at the subscribers request and to precise locations, rather than full nationwide availability all the time.
According to Nancy Brumfield, AT&T Advanced Messaging Division’s vice president of marketing, the two services have nothing to do with the impending sale of the Advanced Messaging Unit to Metrocall Inc.
“The deal is not closed, so we’re just continuing to run our business as normal,” she said.
SkyTel issued a release stating its belief the catalyst for this recent advanced messaging resale activity was the introduction of several new narrowband personal communications services paging devices by Motorola Inc. and Glenayre Technologies Inc.’s Wireless Access Group.
“While agreements have been in place for some time with all major carriers, many carriers were waiting for the new compact devices,” said Calvin LaRoche, senior vice president of SkyTel’s wholesale division. “The announced campaigns by PageNet and AT&T confirm that they also believe the market will respond strongly to the new products.”
Glenayre and Motorola have developed four new advanced messaging devices, all of which meet or come close to the form factor of a traditional one-way device.
However, only two are available today. As such, PageNet and SkyTel initially are providing older paging models for these new services.
