Dear Friends,

First of all, I want to thank everyone for their responses to last week's newsletter. Your positive comments and encouragement are really appreciated.

This is my weekly newsletter about Wireless Data and Radio Paging. You are receiving this message because you have either communicated with me via e-mail about a wireless topic, or your e-mail address was included in another e-mail that I received. This is not a SPAM. If you received this message in error, and you do not wish to receive any more of these newsletters, please click here, then click on "send."

From the Boston Globe (on 4/1/02)
In a key boost for adoption of ''short messaging services'' by US cellphone subscribers, Verizon Wireless, the country's biggest cellphone carrier, this week is committing to enabling its 29 million subscribers to send short messages to other carriers' customers. Verizon is the last of the big consumer-oriented wireless carriers to make a public commitment to allowing subscribers to send so-called SMS notes - messages of up to 160 characters tapped out on the phone keypad - to other carriers' customers just by entering their 10-digit phone number.

Hoping to jump-start an SMS market that has exploded in Europe but has been slow to develop here, AT&T Wireless in December became the first national wireless player to commit to intercarrier SMS.

In Europe and Japan, SMS traffic regularly exceeds 100 million messages a day, according to industry studies, as people use their phones to chat with friends or send short messages... To read the rest of the story click here.

My comments !
This is clear evidence that way we communicate -- world wide -- has changed. Text messaging is now frequently preferred over voice. Those of us who work in paging have known the advantages of text over voice for a long time. Now the rest of the world is discovering what they now call "texting." The survival of the paging industry depends on our ability to offer innovative text-based services that work better and cost less than those offered by our wireless-telephone competitors.

Telefonica Moviles plans to double subscribers
Spanish mobile operator Telefonica Moviles said it plans to double its 30m subscribers by 2005—but it expected most of its growth to come from Mexico and Brazil, while some European investments would be scaled back. In its home market, Moviles said it hopes to have 20m clients by 2005, an increase of 3m. The rest of Europe is expected to make up another 5m in the next three years, while Latin America would see the biggest growth, the company said. Click here for the rest of the story.

RIM Licensing BlackBerry Platform To Vendors
Research In Motion [yesterday said] it will offer its BlackBerry reference design program to wireless device manufacturers, enabling the development of more gadgets using its platform. The program will include hardware and software platforms for building phones and devices embedded with BlackBerry and Java technologies. Analog Devices Inc. will provide participating vendors with an integrated processor that supports both wireless communications and Java applications on a single chip. Click here for the rest of the story.

For a very interesting presentation on The Wireless Watchman solution for monitoring boats, click here. This is an application using the CreataLink 2XT with a GPS chip which is in actual use today.

If you have anything that you would like to add to the Buy or Sell list please send me all the details.

Please check out the following web sites and let me know if you find anything that you need.

The Wireless Watchman Wireless Telemetry with GPS localization.

WaveWare Technologies Pagers, serial port controlled paging encoders, and paging base stations.

MCK Technologies Sales and repair of paging infrastructure equipment.

Telelink Wireless Technologies Paging Terminals and Voice Mail.

Ticker Communications Wireless information delivered to LED signs.

DigitPro Communications Pagers and Paging Data Receivers.

Digitel Online The leading wireless service provider in Mexico.

Comments from an old friend about the state of wireless businesses:

Brad,

I remember you from way back and I too believe that paging is not dead!! I do however think that the whole wireless communications business must be revamped so that persons that have the knowledge are remunerated for their efforts.

I also believe that maybe SMS service will replace person to person communications but paging is still a good way to get information out to everyone. Thinks will start informing persons of events happening, alert persons or groups of persons to messages waiting, scores made etc. Problem is that the paging community still wants to see themselves as the only way that people should communicate. I think a one-way data network is one of the methods to communicate but certainly not the only way.

I have not sat still either. We have developed add on middle ware programs that allow receive messages from a range of devices, web pages, alarm dialers and then be able to send them to a myriad of devices like SMS, Pager, E-mail, Fax. We have tried to make the message king and not the network. Networks want to conquer all. They want all resellers to be puppets of only their network. So now we have customers asking, what are supposed to be communications experts but are really an extension of the network, questions that they will not get the right answer but rather a partial answer from the network they sell for.

What has to happen is the resellers have to be able to sell on anyone's networks anytime. 

Frank Dijker Frank@multipathtech.com

More contact information
My AOL Instant Messenger screen name is "BradDye" without the quotes
For Microsoft MSN Messenger use "Brad Dye"