Paging India

From delivering the daily news headlines with a buzz at the breakfast table to offering stock quotes and cricket scores, and from beeping airline reservation information and e-mail messages to even booking theatre tickets, the pager will become a universal assistant, says Wright.

Wright should know. Having spent over 25 years in Motorolas communications group, he has seen communications technology evolve from the crude contrivances of yesteryear to the supremely sophisticated devices of today. An electronic engineer himself, Wrights own contribution to new technological developments has been considerable he holds five patents in his name!.

Wright was in India recently to celebrate the fourteenth anniversary of the demise of paging, as he lightly puts it. When cellular phones came into the market some fourteen years ago, there were grave predictions of the death of the pager. However, as subsequent events proved, nothing of the sort happened. There are some 115 million pagers in the world today and their number continues to grow.

India, with 650,000 pagers today, is the smallest market yet; but Wright feels this is the fastest growing pager market the world has ever seen. The US took almost 30 years to have a million pager users. China, with 40 million pagers today, took only seven years to reach the first one million users. But India is set to break all records, says Wright. We expect it to hit the million mark in less than three years, he predicts. For Motorola, which has almost 70 per cent of the pager market, this would mean a pot of gold. But Wright may see it as just another beep in the history of paging.