From simple beeps to ticker-tape printouts, the message is clear. Pagers and mobile phones are rapidly becoming more useful and affordable.
When Exotron Corp., a Princeton, N.J., manufacturer of ultrasonic and electronic devices for treating neuromuscular disorders, made the decision to move from research only into sales, it needed a way to distinguish itself from its competitors. Most suppliers of this specialty equipment are "Monday-through-Friday, 9-to-5 type operations," says Joseph Grossman, the company's director of operations. Being on call 24 hours a day seemed the best way for Exotron to gain a foothold in the market.
Conventional "beep" pagers were issued to the company's 19 sales and service personnel, who could then be signaled by Exotron's answering service any time of the day or night. However, for the hospitals, doctors, physical therapists, and sports teams that account for Exotron's $1 million in annual sales, service means more than machine maintenance and repair. Many of these customers have urgent, detailed questions about treatment procedures for Peter Amiet, the company's president and a specialist in therapeutic medicine.
Amiet, who spends much of his time lecturing at hospitals and out-of-state medical schools, needed something more sophisticated than a beeper. The answer was "voice retrieval," a relatively new development in the rapidly advancing technology of mobile communications.
Depending on his location, Amiet carries either an ultrahigh frequency (UHF) pager that operates over an area of approximately 200 square miles but emits only tone signals, or a very-high frequency (VHF) unit, more limited in its range but equipped with a liquid crystal display (LCD) screen to show either a telephone number or a single-digit code. When either the code appears on the VHF pager or he hears a special tone from the UHF unit, Amiet knows a voice message has been received at an electronic message center operated by his paging service, Radiofone Corp., of Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
This "voice mailbox" can be reached only by a special telephone number he has distributed to about 100 high-priority customers. Amiet receives the signal within 10 seconds of a call being placed to that number, alerting him to contact the center.
Pagers capable of delivering messages in the caller's voice have been available for some time. But the technology has new flexibility. Unlike voice-transmission pagers, which digitally encode a message and then play it out once, voice-retrieval systems store and replay the message as often as the user wants to hear it. The feature is particularly appreciated by those who have lost vital parts of sentences while straining to listen over the sounds of traffic or through the interference caused by high buildings.
The cost of the voice-retrieval option varies slightly according to the supplier. Radiofone charges Exotron $10 a month, in addition to the $23 and $33 fees that the company pays for its tone-signal and numerical-display pagers, respectively. Although providing this service for three executives adds $30 a month to the company's paging bill, bringing the total to about $450, Grossman considers it a bargain. "The cost," he says, "is still only a fraction of what we pay for conventional answering services."
Voice retrieval also adds an element of two-way communication to paging. Unlike mobile telephones, another evolving branch of telecommunications, paging wasn't designed as a medium for conversation. A voice mailbox offers the next best thing, letting users not only pick up calls, but also leave messages, which they can alter as frequently as they want from any location.
Currently, the geographic mobility of pager users is limited by the short signal range of paging companies, which are tied into the lines of local telephone companies. Incoming messages are electronically coded into signals that can be broadcast via transmitters, which have an average range of only about 25 miles. That means wide-area signaling, such as Amiet enjoys, is available only when a paging company either owns a large number of transmitting facilities -- Radiofone has 109 scattered over several states -- or has been able to work out cooperative arrangements with other companies that hold broadcasting licenses and operate transmitters in adjacent territories.
Barriers to long-distance paging are falling rapidly, however. Radio Common Carriers (RCCs) -- the hundreds of federally licensed companies that provide paging, car telephone, and portable-telephone services -- have traditionally tended to be small, entrepreneurial operations. But a surge of subscriber demand for paging services and the anticipation of a revolution in the mobile-telephone market is fast attracting bigger players to the industry.
"We are guessing that, within two years, we'll see the whole common-carrier industry turn over," says Jerry Taylor, president of MCI Airsignal Inc., a corporation formed after MCI Communications Corp. acquired WUI Inc. Taylor's company is a good example of the changes he predicts. The purchase of WUI and the formation of its Airsignal subsidiary gave MCI an immediate base of RCC licenses in 52 cities. MCI Airsignal is filing for many more common carrier license permits, as are other large corporations, such as Washington Post Co. and Cox Communications Inc. One of the most aggressive has been Metromedia Inc., which has purchased five RCCs over the past year, including Radiofone. Several Federal Communications Commission decisions and one major technological advance -- cellular radio -- are behind the increased interest in RCCs.
Paging devices and mobile telephones have existed for decades. But the capacity to provide service to users has been limited by the finite number of radio frequencies, or channels, that exist for broadcasting either one-way (paging) or two-way (mobile and portable telephone) signals. Last spring, however, the FCC drastically altered this situation. Forty new channels for paging applications were opened up -- three of them specifically set aside for regional or nationwide paging through either a network of cooperating RCCs or, possibly, satellite transmission by a single company. At the same time, the commission allocated 666 previously unused UHF channels for licensing to operators of cellular-radio services.
The technology for cellular radio is radically different from that used previously with mobile phones. Instead of relying on powerful transmitters to broadcast signals over an entire metropolitan area, cellular operates on a grid system. A region is divided into sections, or cells. As the user travels from section to section, a signal is passed along from one low-power transmitter and one short-reach channel to another. Computerized switching devices eliminate traffic jams on frequencies in much the way synchronized traffic lights ease auto congestion on city streets.
