f e a t u r e  s t o r y

BETTER THAN BEEPERS

Paging is expanding in service plans, features and message content.

Steve Sturgess
Senior Editor

The last decade has seen an explosion of communications technologies. Simple radio dispatch and payphone check calls have given way to satellite and cellular technologies to deliver real-time information about freight and truck movements coast-to-coast. Where appropriate, regional and national paging has filled a useful and growing niche in providing alternative and, in many cases, complementary messaging at lower cost. And, propelled by an increasingly mobile workforce throughout the economy, paging is getting better and better. It is pushing the boundaries of accepted use by expanding into the two-way messaging field.
Major pager players include SkyTel, PageNet and AirTouch. Cue has targeted the trucking industry with a service tailored to the interstate system rather than population centers, using sideband capacity on FM radio stations. ARDIS is a low-orbit satellite system that offers messaging capacity for data to service resellers who use the carrier for their own services. Ram Mobile Data does likewise from radio towers. Both these service providers are poised to enter the communications market with dedicated hardware devices to receive and send e-mail messages. Orbcomm, currently offering trailer tracking on its first two satellites, is ready to launch 10 more birds for a satellite-based two-way messaging service on custom hardware.
All offer a bewildering array of services. Some offer message consolidation from a range of sources such as phone, e-mail, fax and operator connect. And payment plans cover the spectrum from a few dollars a month to programs that cost close to $100 for the all-encompassing message solutions.
Pagers are developing fast, too. Conventional pagers have become smaller and more convenient. But for most people, pagers are the “beepers” that hang on your belt.
Except now they may not be. The service providers working through “resellers” are bundling new keyboard communications devices, airtime and software.
And there is a new mobile communications development that has hit this year. What makes it especially interesting is that it is based on a portable computer “platform” that provides a lot more functions than the ability to receive, display and send messages. When fully in place, this new technology may provide yet another communications alternative to create a whole new class of paging and messaging devices.

MOBILE COMPUTING
The development of the handheld personal information manager is only a few years old. It has been characterized by some spectacular misstarts, like the early Apple Newton, and some limited functionality electronic organizers that promised more than they delivered. But just a year ago at Comdex, Microsoft and partnering hardware manufacturers unveiled a full-fledged operating system running on the latest generation of handheld personal information managers.
These new units are the so-called palmtop computers. And Windows CE is the new operating system created for them and for a host of new palmtops due to hit the scene through 1998 and on into the next century.
Windows CE has the look and feel of Microsoft’s almost universal Windows 95 operating system and makes these new, pocket-sized computers as functional as many desktop machines of only a year or so ago. In June this year, CE was updated to version 1.1. Now comes 2.0, broadening its functions. According to Richard Nelson, of handheld-device pioneer EduCalc of Laguna Niguel, CA, Windows CE is the operating system of the future. “Microsoft has said that the future will see only two (Microsoft) operating systems: NT and CE,” says Nelson. In Handheld PC, a new publication tracking the development of new mini-computers, Andrew Seybold, president of the Portable Computing and Communications Assn., writes, “... the Windows CE platform and the accompanying hardware will provide the ‘killer’ application for the wireless data industry.”
These palmtops have been a huge hit, not just at specialists like EduCalc but at computer and office equipment stores across the country. The $300 to $600 wallet-sized computers, with their 2- and 4-MB RAM and teeny but complete array of alpha keys, are being snapped up as fast as the new shipments arrive. The reason is simple: They are fulfilling a major organization need for the “mobile professional.” The software included in the CE operating system allows them to synchronize schedulers, calendars and contact lists with their office desktop computers. And that is only the start.
According to Nelson, while these devices are handy today, their functionality is set to explode with mainstream software ready to hit the scene. “There’s not yet the depth of software options that there is for DOS, but that has been around for 15 years,” he commented. Even though Windows CE is just a year old, “Microsoft claims that 750 to 1,000 developers are recompiling or writing new software, and by mid 1998 it’s very clear a lot of mainstream applications will be here.”

E-MAIL WIRELESS ACCESS
Mobile computing is not just about mini-applications and time-management. A major pressure forcing mobile computing generally is the need to communicate away from the office. The road-warrior professionals who have made the laptop computer such a hot item increasingly need to get into home-office databases, intranets and the Internet to access their databases, transmit information and respond to e-mail.
Phone modems have been hot peripherals for these laptops, getting ever faster to exchange more data and display complex intranet and Internet graphics. And now they are small, slot-sized devices that tuck into the PCMCIA Type II slot in the side of a laptop to hook it into the phone system. But modems still required hard-wiring into a phone line to work.
Until now.
There is a new generation of wireless modem that untethers the traveling computer user from phone lines.
These wireless modems have built-in antennas to link with service providers like ARDIS and RAM Mobile Data. They were created to give laptop users such as salesmen, engineers, technical support specialists, consultants and even attorneys the facility to go “online” with their own in-house databases without having to hunt for a phone line or wait until evening and use an in-room dataport at a hotel.
These wireless devices, the Motorola Personal Messenger 100D and the US Robotics Allpoints Wireless PC card, fit into the same PCMCIA accessory card slot the more conventional slot, modems use. But wireless modems hook up across the airwaves instead of the phone companies’ land lines.
Many palmtops incorporate the PCMCIA slot. So wireless connectivity no longer requires the portable but still bulky laptop computer with its cumbersome boot-up and short-lived battery. Now the marriage of the wireless modem and the handheld PC creates a new paging and messaging device. And already software tools from third-party vendors are available as the final piece of the picture, not only to enable communications but to provide many additional services on top of straight data exchange. Included are e-mail and paging functions, voice and fax messaging.

PALMTOP PAGING SERVICE
Because of the versatility of the palmtop running Windows CE, new software is appearing daily. And paging and e-mail service bundles are no exception.
Software and service providers Ikon MobileChoice, RadioMail and Mail on the Run!, for example, offer wireless faxing, two-way paging, operator services and Internet e-mail access on the ARDIS network. To an extent, these bundles are aimed more at the traveling businessperson, with local services in nearly 11,000 cities but considerable dead space between.
Ram Mobile Data claims 93% coverage, but again that is over the urban areas of the country. On the bright side, both services claim to be offering increased coverage in the future.
WyndMail and Zap It are both services based on the Ram network. WyndMail subscribers get messages instantly, says the company, without dialing in. Using the e-mail application built in to Windows CE, users can access e-mail and send and receive messages that have voice-to-text conversion in both directions, thus allowing the keyboard device to handle even voice-mail messages.
Zap It from DTS Wireless is also a one-stop messaging system that handles just about any form of communication through a single channel into and out of the handheld PC. A feature of these services is that they allow for the transmission of extensive e-mail messages – far more information than you can get in a page. But they also allow the downloading of message headers, usually at no cost. That means the service can be used with a basic cost of only around $10 a month for very inexpensive paging.
Services are priced according to the anticipated usage. DTS Wireless, for instance, has a base of $9.95 plus 25 cents for a 500 character message. A “standard” plan is $24.95 and includes 85 messages, while the Value Plus plan includes 350 messages. The service provider also will arrange leases on the wireless modem, bundling the whole system together with available plans. This makes the hardware/software/service relatively easily affordable, with a comprehensive plan costing around $80 a month.
According to the service providers, the wireless communications bundles provide all the functions available on a cellular phone service, such as voice mail, but they are very inexpensive compared to conventional cellular charges. The reason is the data services charge for the packets of data transmitted, rather than for air time.
And with all the features of the one-stop messaging services, the ability to channel all communications offers a significant bonus over conventional paging and cellular services.

THE DOWNSIDE
The communications features provided by the combination of the handheld PC and the wireless modem are impressive. They transcend the functionality of the simple pager with the ability to send complex messages in both directions and to a wide variety of different services: e-mail, voice, fax, paging.
But there are negatives. The first, for the trucking industry, is service availability across the country. Many of the “mobile solutions” that are based on handheld or laptop PCs are targeted at the business traveler who flies in to a city to hold meetings and conducts business where there are other people gathered. These service areas are naturally the big cities and the densely populated suburbs. Even with 93% of the country’s population covered, Ram Mobile Data’s coverage map looks very spotty to the trucker.
And the pager’s big plus is that it is switched on all the time, so that a page gets a virtually instant response. That may or may not be important for a trucker who might then have to look for a phone to respond to the page. The handheld PC has to be switched on to receive the page/e-mail, but since service is only available in urban areas, the answer is to check for messages while cruising through the available service areas.
Certainly, regional operators are better served, especially if they are running in the Northeast. But these services are in their infancy today. If the wireless modem/handheld PC grows as fast as the cell phone has and as fast as industry guru Andrew Seybold predicts, very soon we will have widespread coverage and be looking at an entirely different way of dealing with all those messages that are part and parcel of trucking today.

SIDEBAR
Hardware, Software and Service Bundles for Palmtop Paging