Adding beeps to that ringing
Your digital cellular phone has paging capabilities, but firms slow to offer
services
By Simson Garfinkel, 03/04/99
If you carry around one of those nifty digital cell phones, there's something
you should know: You are also carrying around an alphanumeric pager.
Over the past few months, all of the national wireless providers, and many
regional ones, have added paging to their services.
To be fair, some companies, like Omnipoint, have been offering paging since
they launched their service. Other companies, like Sprint PCS, have had
paging built into their systems for a long time but have only recently
started advertising the capability.
The whole idea of sending a page to a cell phone makes a lot of sense. After
all, a functioning cell phone is always turned on, and it's always listening
for an incoming telephone call. Making the cell phone also listen for a page
doesn't take any more hardware or power, it just takes a bit more
programming.
Likewise, today's cell phones have relatively large bitmapped graphical
displays, so they already have what's necessary to display pages once they
are received. From a carrier's point of view, page messages are tiny, so they
don't take any significant capacity away from normal telephone operations.
And they're reliable, since the cell phones acknowledge each message that
they receive. Unlike a traditional one-way pager, you won't lose a short
messaging service message, as these pages are properly known, if you happen
to be underground when it is sent.
But don't throw away your conventional pager just yet. The reason some
wireless phone carriers have been slow to market SMS services isn't
technology, but marketing, education, and internal personnel issues. It's
easier for a company to sell a service that customers understand, like
two-way voice communications, than to try to sell something new, like a
combined cell phone, pager, calculator, datebook, things-to-do list, e-mail
system, and fax machine. That's too bad, because the only difference between
what these companies are offering today, and what they could be selling, is
programming.
Another reason for the delay is pricing: Companies haven't yet decided
whether they will make more money by bundling in advanced data services as
part of their basic offering, or whether they'll do better by charging extra
for them.
A final problem is corporate training. There is a severe shortage of
engineers, technical sales people, and customer service representatives.
Over the past few weeks I've been experimenting with the paging services
offered by AT&T Wireless, Bell Atlantic, Omnipoint, and Sprint PCS. Although
the underlying technology works pretty well, all of the companies need to
work on the way pages are sent and displayed.
If you want to send a page to somebody's cell phone, you have two choices:
Send it by e-mail or send it over the Web using a browser. Unlike a
conventional pager, you can't simply call an 800-number and dictate a message
to an operator.
To send a page by e-mail, you send a message to a special Internet address.
To send a page using a Web browser, you click to a special Web page and fill
out a form.
For every provider I tried, sending a message by the Web was both faster and
more reliable: Web-based messages were typically delivered in seconds; e-mail
usually took a few minutes, sometimes as long as an hour, and were
occasionally lost.
Qualcomm's CDMA paging technology, used by both Sprint and Bell Atlantic,
allows you to specify a callback phone number; get a page with a call back,
and you can return a call to that number with the press of a button.
CellularOne allows a callback number, but AT&T doesn't. Omnipoint's GSM
technology is actually a two-way paging system: You can receive pages, reply
to them, or initiate your own. With Omnipoint, it's easy to send messages to
another GSM phone but hard to send messages to standard Internet e-mail
addresses.
(Contrast this with the two-way pagers offered by both Skytel and Bell South,
which allow you to send e-mail to any Internet address you wish, as well as
fax machines and conventional telephone numbers.)
Another difference is pricing. Omnipoint gives its customers 10 free pages
each month or you can buy a package of 30 pages/month for $9.99. Sprint gives
free numeric paging to all of its customers, but text paging costs an
additional $1.99/month for 30 messages, $9.99/month for 500 messages. Check
with the other vendors for their plans.
For me, the real attraction of paging is turning my cell phone into a
combination datebook and reminder service. For example, you can send yourself
a message tomorrow morning at 9:15 so you don't miss that important 9:30
meeting. This is such a simple idea that it is fairly surprising only one of
the providers, CellularOne, is offering service on its Web sites.
Being able to send e-mail messages to phones is just one more example of the
way that the lines between all kinds of computerized systems are blurring.
Cellular telephones aren't really ''phones'' - they're high-speed mobile
computers with many megabytes of RAM, long-term storage, a sound card,
batteries, and a wireless network interface. What's really needed now is for
manufacturers to open up their systems so that small companies, college
students, and even hobbyists can write their own programs for these
computers. More about that next week.
Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at plugged-in @
simson.net
This story ran on page D04 of the Boston Globe on 03/04/99.
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
Also:
Follow-up to RIM/Intel announcement of May 4, 1998. See
rim.net for details)
Always Sympathetic Ear For Dreary Commutes
By MATT RICHTEL
New York Times, March 4, 1999
Until recently, people who talked to their cars were generally considered to
be bemused, unstable or possibly nuts. Soon they will be considered the
high-tech elite.
In the near future, a driver seen chatting to the dashboard may in fact be
giving voice commands to a new on-board personal computer (of course, the
person could still be nuts).
The first such device was introduced late last year by Clarion, a car-stereo
manufacturer, but the concept is getting a leg up from Intel, which has
developed a microprocessor that is specifically designed for the rigors of
use in a car computer.
At the Society of Automobile Engineers in Detroit this week, Intel is talking
about the capabilities of what it calls its Connected Car PC. Among the
prospective features: a Global Positioning System that will give a driver the
car's location, directions to destinations and voice control over the radio,
CD player and cellular phone.
It will also let passengers have access to e-mail and surf the Internet.
Drivers will also be able to ask the computer to download news stories or
traffic news from the Internet, then read the information aloud using a voice
synthesizer, said Patrick Johnson, director of in-car computing operations at
Intel.
Johnson said that the cost for the computers would be $1,500 to $2,000 and
that various car makers and electronics makers would be making them available
later this year.
The computer's microprocessors will be unusual in that they must be able to
withstand temperatures as high as 200 degrees and as low as 40 degrees below
zero to meet automotive industry standards.
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