• silicon.com
• Technology
• Mobile

By Felicity Ussher, 20 November 1998 17:46

NEWS Getting information from the Internet onto your pager is about to become a reality - but only in the US. Leading US paging companies yesterday announced a set of standards that they claim will make it easy for information services to broadcast direct to people's trouser-tops. The 11 companies are AirTouch Paging, Ameritech Cellular, Arch Communciations, Metrocall, MobileComm, Network Services, PageMart, PageNet, Preferred Networks, SkyTel and Teletouch. Between them, the companies service around 30 million consumers. Steve Jacoby, chief operating officer of MetroCall, told Silicon.com: "The standards define an interface for the data, and give consumers the option to add or delete services." SkyTel spokeswoman, Pam Kloha, said: "We already have the capability - it is as cheap to send content to a million customers as to just one. These standards will encourage content providers to transmit content, and this gives more choice to customers." Kloha said European companies will have problems adopting the standards, as the necessary broadcast frequencies are already allocated to cellular phones. European companies including BT, PageOne and Vodafone were unavailable for comment. US pagers will start by broadcasting weather, stocks, headline news and sports results, but will become increasingly customised. Although all 11 members of the alliance will be developing their own services, Motorola and Glenayre Technologies will provide a common platform for transmissions. "We go live this December with 100 different services on Motorola's IKno! platform," said Jacoby. "We'll be offering more specialised services than we are now, including entertainment listings and CD releases." Of Metrocall's 5.5 million clients, 18 per cent currently use their pagers for email and interactive services. "All our internal studies show that demand is greatest in this area," said Jacoby.