The second round of war among paging operators is being flagged off by Motorola as they go all out to promote their new high-speed paging protocol, the Flex standard, in the country.
Even as the Motorola joint venture paging services venture, Hotline Paging, recently claims that they are the first to switch operations from the existing POCSAG (Post Office Code Standard Advisory group) to the new Flex standard in Mumbai and Bangalore, the fuming rivals protest.
Says Sandip Das, CEO of the competitor, Max Page, the citys leading paging service operator: Motorola is trying to confuse the market by claiming this protocol will enhance their services for the end-user. That is not true; apart from benefiting the operator by allowing him to increase his subscriber load, theres no major advantage for the end-user.
Suresh Srinivasan, general manager (marketing & sales) of Hotline Paging, however, disagrees.
We stoutly refute this. People are talking about this protocol without understanding it. Motorola has been working on the Flex protocol in their labs since 1993. It was introduced to the world in 1995 and countries like the US, Singapore and China have adopted it, he said.
The Flex technology enables pagers to become more compact and have features like bigger memory, longer messages and battery life, provides 12 times more superior protection against fading than POCSAG product and above all makes way for futuristic products such as two-way paging. The major advantage of Flexprotocol, however, being its channel capacity of nearly 1 lakh subscribers to POCSAGs 30,000.
Along with its move to Flex technology, Hotline Paging has also launched their Motorolas Flex pager, Memo Jazz, as the worlds smallest and smartest pager. Costing Rs 7,500 (much higher than the average price of Rs 4,000-4,500) the Flex range boasts of features like ability to coddle up 200 characters, a notebook facility of 2208 characters and a three event reminder.
They are trying to muscle their way into the paging market through a protocol and their patented Flex pagers. It is not a tried and tested protocol like POCSAG which is used internationally.
As far as providing better quality, there are more compact and better pagers being produced in the world today, Sandip Das pointed out.