National paging companies sell through company-owned stores, resellers, and retail chains like Office Depot and Best Buy. You can call the 800 number (see below) or check the Yellow Pages for the company paging store nearest you.
Some smaller paging companies supply you with an E-mail address, but don't assume yours will. If your provider doesn't, you can enlist the services of Interpage Network Services, in West Hartford, Conn. For $10 a month or less, the company assigns an E-mail address to any pager.
Silva signed on with Interpage not only because it gave him an E-mail address when his local PageNet provider couldn't, but also because it offers news and weather services. "Weather is critical in my business," he says. "I don't have time to sit and watch it on TV." Throughout the day, weather reports, along with national-news updates, flash across Silva's pager's liquid-crystal-display (LCD) panel. Interpage also provides stock prices, sports scores, and even horoscopes.
Despite the array of PC-related services, alphanumeric paging has some limitations. Many pagers--or paging services--limit the length of a message to 240 characters. You can receive longer messages, but it can be expensive and cumbersome to do so. The text has to be broken into a series of separate message packets, each within the character limit. You may be billed for each packet separately, and the packets are likely to arrive out of order. So for practical purposes, paging is ill suited to anything but the briefest of messages.
More significant is that paging is primarily a one-way means of communication. To date, only SkyTel offers two-way, send-and-receive service that allows pagers to respond to PCs or Macs. (The other national services are expected to follow suit in 1997.) SkyTel's two-way paging devices have 16 predefined responses, like "On my way," "Thank you," "Will call later," "Yes," "No," and "Where are you?" You can also preset responses into the text of your message. The recipient chooses among the responses by aligning a small arrow on the display panel with the selected response and hitting the "send" button.
The need to respond on the fly got Serdar Yurdakul to trade in his one-way pager for a two-way Motorola alpha with a SkyTel 2-Way system. As vice-president of computer-telephony products for DSP Group, in Santa Clara, Calif., he spends nearly two weeks of every month on the road, selling the company's speech-compression chips to customers planning to embed the technology in their video phones.
"Sometimes you need an on-the-spot answer for an out-of-the-ordinary situation," Yurdakul says. When a customer's order calls for unusual pricing, he zaps an E-mail from his Hewlett-Packard palmtop computer to his boss's two-way pager: "Let me know if the below pricing is acceptable." His boss can shoot back a reply by aligning the arrow on his pager with the response he wants to make. The national two-way service costs the company $74.95 a month. (Local two-way coverage would cost $24.95.)
Though the advantage of two-way paging is clear, you usually can't create messages on a pager. However, that situation is changing. SkyTel is currently testing the SkyWriter, a two-way device that lets users write messages. The device is too small to house a keyboard, however. Instead, you "type" by moving a cursor over the letters of the alphabet, choosing the ones you want and entering them into the message text by pressing a "select" button--a method so cumbersome that most users aren't likely to find it worth the effort.
Then again, most people don't expect technology to have an answer for everything. As Mortgage Link's Scott puts it, "The pager sure helps, but it's no substitute for working 12 hours a day."
RESOURCES
National Paging Companies
AT&T Wireless Services, Kirkland, WA; 800-354-PAGE; http://www.unwired.com
PageMart, Dallas; 800-324-PAGE; http://www.pagemart.com; E-mail: info@pagemart.com
PageNet (Paging Network), Plano, TX; 800-PAGENET; http://www.pagenet.com
SkyTel, Washington, D.C.; 800-456-3333; http://www.skytel.com
Products
Notify!, a line of wireless messaging software; Ex Machina, New York City; 212-843-0000; http://www.exmachina.com
PageCard, a combined PCMCIA card and pager that works with PageNet service; Socket Communications, Newark, CA; 800-552-3300; http://www.socketcom.com; E-mail: info@socketcom.com
PageMaster, wireless messaging software; Omnitrend Software, Farmington, CT; 860-678-7679; http://www.omnitrend.com
PageSoft for Act!, adds paging capability to ACT for Windows (Symantec's sales-and-contact-management software); Socket Communications, Newark, CA; 800-552-3300; http://www.socketcom.com; E-mail: info@socketcom.com
E-mail Addresses
Interpage Network Services, West Hartford, CT; 800-624-6964; E-mail: info@interpage.net
Jennifer deJong writes frequently about business and technology.
