f 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
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