Page 1 2 3 Page 1 2 3 | FRIDAY - JULY 7, 2006 - ISSUE NO. 219 |
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| Wireless Messaging Newsletter | ||
| WIRELESS  MESSAGING | |
| EUROPEAN MOBILE MESSAGING ASSOCIATION |
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| EUROPEAN MOBILE MESSAGING ASSOCIATION |
| FEATURED ADVERTISERS SUPPORTING THE NEWSLETTER |
| WIRELESS MESSAGING NEWS |
Ofcom streamlines business radio licenses Making it easier for 50,000 licence holders By Steve Ranger Published: Friday 7 July 2006 Ofcom wants to streamline the licensing of private radio communications, cutting back on the regulation of 50,000 organisations in the UK. The business radio licenses are used by companies from high street taxi firms to oil companies, utilities, transport businesses and supermarket chains, as well as the emergency services. The various different types of licenses cover uses including on-site and wide area speech and data systems; remote meter reading; asset tracking; hospital paging; and emergencies services speech systems. The watchdog will replace 21 different types of licence, covering 50,000 licensees, with just three categories. Within each category, restrictions on the permitted type of business radio use and technology will be removed, freeing use of the spectrum. In future 15,000 licensees will be able to apply online and pay a flat fee of £75 for a five-year licence. New types of licence will be tradable. The deadline for responses to Ofcom's consultation on the licence changes is 15 September. |
Source: silicon.com
| FEATURED ADVERTISERS SUPPORTING THE NEWSLETTER |
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Daviscomms—Product Examples For information about our Contract Manufacturing services or our Pager or Telemetry line, please call Bob Popow at 480-515-2344, bob@daviscommsusa.com or visit our web site www.daviscommsusa.com
| CUSTOM APPLICATIONS
Please call me so we can discuss your need or your idea. Or contact me by e-mail for more information | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
High-speed simulcast Paging with protocols such as POCSAG and FLEX™ requires microsecond accuracy to synchronize the transmission of digital Paging signals.  Zetron's Simulcast System uses GPS timing information to ensure that the broadcasted transmissions between the nodes of the Simulcast System and associated transmitters are synchronized to very tight tolerances. This system is ideal for public or private Paging system operators that use multiple transmitters and wish to create new Paging systems or to build out existing systems into new regions. For more information about Zetron's High Speed Simulcast Paging System, the Model 600 and Model 620, go to: www.zetron.com/paging.
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| WIRELESS MESSAGING NEWS |
DOJ to FCC: Defer action on DoCoMo's transaction
Teleguam opposes deal, citing security issues
By Ferdie de la Torre
Reporter
Saturday, July 01, 2006
The U.S. Department of Justice has asked the Federal Communications Commission to defer action on Japan's NTT DoCoMo Inc.'s application for assignment and transfer of control of Guam Cellular and Paging Inc. and Guam Wireless Telephone Co. LLC. to DoCoMo.
TeleGuam Holdings LLC-the parent company of Guam exchange carrier GTA-has also asked FCC to deny the proposed assignment and transfer of control, raising security concerns. These actions could delay the proposed merger of GuamCell, SaipanCell, and Hafatel into one company under DoCoMo.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Laura H. Parsky of the DOJ's Criminal Division urged FCC not to take action on DoCoMo's application until such time the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security have the chance to look at some issues.
Parsky said the DOJ, FBI, and DHS will notify the Commission whether any potential national security, law enforcement, and public safety issues raised by the applications have or have not been resolved.
"After receiving notice of the applications, DOJ, FBI, and DHS have been in contact with the applicants to obtain information relating to national security, law enforcement, and public safety issues," said Parksy in her June 8, 2006 letter to FCC.
She added that the DOJ, FBI and DHS would promptly advise the Commission upon completion of their review.
NTT DoCoMo proposes to wholly acquire Guam Cellular and Paging Inc. and Guam Wireless Telephone Co. LLC. for a total of $71.8 million and them merge the companies.
Guam Cellular operates Guamcell Communications and Saipancell Communications. Guam Wireless Telephone Co. LLC. operates HafaTel.
With over 50 million subscribers, NTT reportedly has more than half of Japan's market share.
Gov. Benigno R. Fitial wrote on June 22, 2006 to FCC chair Kevin J. Martin, expressing his strong support to NTT DoCoMO's proposed acquisition.
"We strongly welcome NTT DoCoMo's investment in our market and expect that our citizens will benefit from their financial strength, technological expertise, and innovation," Fitial said.
If the acquisition is approved, the governor pointed out, NTT DoCoMo will be able to offer CNMI residents better access to advanced services and technologies in the wireless industry.
Meanwhile, TeleGuam Holdings LLC has asked FCC to deny the proposed assignment and transfer of control, raising issued related to competitiveness and risk to national security.
"The proposed foreign ownership of the leading wireless provider in Guam raises significant competitive issues and, because of the major military presence on Guam, presents a risk to national security," said Richard J. Metzger, TeleGuam's vice president for regulatory.
Metzger said the proposed ownership by NTT DoCoMo presents additional concerns because it is the dominant wireless carrier in Japan and considering it is ultimately controlled by the Japan government.
Metzger said that, should FCC determine to approve the transaction, "it must impose safeguards to protect the public interest and to prevent the proposed transaction from having adverse effects on national security and competition in Guam."
TeleGuam, through its wholly-owned subsidiaries GTA Telecom and GTA Services, currently offers local landline and long distance services on Guam. Through its wholly owned subsidiary, Pulse Mobile LLC, TeleGuam is also offering wireless services in Guam.
Source: Saipan Tribune
| FEATURED ADVERTISERS SUPPORTING THE NEWSLETTER |
• FIREHOUSES • SCHOOLS • PUBLIC FACILITIES • GOVERNMENT FACILITIES • EMERGENCY ROOMS • WHAT DO FEDERAL AND STATE GOVERNMENT AGENCIES, FORTUNE 500 COMPANIES, WISPS, HAVE IN COMMON? THEY ALL USE NIGHTHAWK. Nighthawk Systems Inc. manufactures low cost and reliable remote control products for fire house alerting, volunteer alerting, activation of warning signs and sirens, and a number of applications for public safety. The Company manufactures the EA1 and the FAS-8 which have been designed specifically for these applications. Both products are paging based and will work with any public or private paging network. They are available in all VHF, UHF, and 900 MHz paging frequencies. The products can serve as the primary notification system or an excellent, low-cost backup to existing systems.
The EA1 is the solution for remotely activating public warning signage. Examples include tornado sirens, flash flood warnings, fire danger, Amber Alert, icy roads, etc. The EA1 can also send text messages to scrolling signs. This can occur in conjunction with the activation of audible alarms and visual strobes. This is ideal for public notification in buildings, schools, hotels, factories, etc. The group call feature allows for any number of signs or flashing lights to be activated at the same time over a wide geographic area. In addition, the EA1 Emergency Alert is the perfect solution for low cost yet highly effective alerting of volunteer fire fighters in their home. When activated the EA1 will emit an audible alarm and activate the power outlet on the units faceplate. A common setup is to simply place the EA1 on a table and plug a lamp into the faceplate. When paged from dispatch or any touch tone phone the EA1 will awaken the fire fighter to a lit room. As an option the EA1 can be ordered with a serial cable, allowing for attachment of a serial printer. When paged the alphanumeric message will be printed out at the same time the alarm sounds and the outlet is activated. The EA1 is an ideal complement to alphanumeric belt pagers common to volunteers.
The FAS-8 is designed for activating one or more relays in a firehouse and if desired, printing the alphanumeric message to a serial printer. For this application the FAS-8 is set to activate upon receiving the proper paging cap code sent from 911 dispatch. Up to eight different devices can be activated all with individual time functions. The most common devices to turn on include the PA amplifier, audible wake up alarm, and house lights. The most common device turned off is the stove. The FAS-8 can accept up to 8 different cap codes and have separate relay and time functions per cap code. This allows for different alerting to be accomplished at the same physical location depending upon which cap code is sent. This can be very helpful when fire crews and medical crews are housed in the same building.
Put the innovative technology of Nighthawk to work for you. For more information on any of our products or services, please contact us. Nighthawk Systems, Inc. Phone: 877-764-4484 |
Something's coming to Chicago 8/23/06!
Contact us: ParkMagic
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Paging Seminar
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Location Devices & ReFLEX Modems
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Download Mr. Mercer's resumé. | Complete Technical Services For The Ira Wiesenfeld, P.E.
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SATELLITE CONTROL FOR PAGING SYSTEMS $500.00 FLAT RATE TAPS—Texas Association of Paging Services is looking for partners on 152.480 MHz. Our association currently uses Echostar, formerly Spacecom, for distribution of our data and a large percentage of our members use the satellite to key their TXs. We have a CommOneSystems Gateway at the uplink in Chicago with a back-up running 24/7. Our paging coverage area on 152.480 MHz currently encompasses Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Kansas. The TAPS paging coverage is available to members of our Network on 152.480 MHz for $.005 a transmitter (per capcode per month), broken down by state or regions of states and members receive a credit towards their bill for each transmitter which they provide to our coverage. Members are able to use the satellite for their own use If you are on 152.480 MHz or just need a satellite for keying your own TXs on your frequency we have the solution for you. TAPS will provide the gateways in Chicago, with Internet backbone and bandwidth on our satellite channel for $ 500.00 (for your system) a month. Contact Ted Gaetjen @ 1-800-460-7243 or tedasap@asapchoice.com | |||||||
Please click here to e-mail Ayrewave. |
[Please note that this a re-print of a Zetron newsletter from September 2002. The specifications and other technical information mentioned here may have changed in the last six years. The ideas for Disaster Paging Alerts are just as valid now as they were then.]
When Disaster Strikes
Disaster Paging Protects Community
Builds Trust for Reseller
In the last ten years, and especially in the wake of Sept 11, state and local officials have had to rethink the role of their public safety agencies. In addition to the typical requirements of everyday 9-1-1 emergency calls, they are increasingly being called upon to respond to terrorist attacks, wildfires, chemical spills, pipeline ruptures, train derailments, bio-hazards, and other wide-scale emergencies that impact whole communities, cities, and sometimes entire regions.
Page 1 is a West Virginia paging and voice mail provider with offices in Charleston and Morgantown. After 12 years in the business, the company has close to 50 paging transmitters on-line and provides coverage for 80-90% of the state. For paging terminals, Page 1 has a Zetron Series 2200 EX at its Charleston shop and two Model 640s at the Morgantown office.
The city of Charleston lies in the Kanawha river valley. The valley i s home to a large number of chemical companies, including DuPont, Union Carbide, Dow, Aventus, Flexus, and Monsanto. Several years ago the owner of Page 1, Ron Lawrence, was talking with the Director of Emergency Operations for the county. During the conversation, the disastrous leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India in 1984 came up. The leak killed 3,800 people and permanently disabled thousands more. As the same chemical involved in the Bhopal disaster, methyl isocyanate (MIC), is also being produced by chemical plants in the Charleston area, the issue of disaster preparedness was uppermost on both men's minds.
Drawing on his years of experience and in-depth knowledge of paging technology, Lawrence floated the idea of creating a disaster paging system.
“We framed the capcodes with four or five different groups for different alerting Ron Lawrence — Owner, Page 1 |
We came up with a group number," Lawrence explains. We framed the capcodes with four or five different groups for different alerting and put in one frame number for what we call the 'Disaster Page.' For a while we had just four or five pagers on the system. It grew larger when the 9-1-1 center added the group number to its dispatch."
Disaster strikes:
Barely a week had passed when the very type of disaster that the system had been created to deal with happened in real Life. A chemical leak occurred at the Flexus chemical plant at the lower end of the valley. Luckily, under the disaster paging plan, Lawrence Communications had already distributed a number of A pagers among the participating public safety agencies. 'The Disaster Page was sent out: 'Chemical Leak. Shelter in place," Lawrence remembers, "and the location of the leak. They loved us after that."
Paging Systems
2000 Series paging terminals are available with advanced features such as PageSaver voice messaging and TNPP/satellite downlink capability for integration with public wide-area paging networks. |
With the value of the disaster paging system proven so dramatically, many other agencies were quick to embrace disaster paging. It's been in effect for seven years now and Lawrence estimates that he currently has close to a thousand disaster pager units in the field. Users include school principals, county officials and most of the local hospitals.
"We have a number of pagers with the city police department," Lawrence says. "We have several pagers for the County Sheriff's department. The city's fire department is also on the disaster paging system, along with three hospitals."
A public service:
It must be pointed out that Page 1 provides the disaster paging system virtually free as a public service. In fact, one of the three hospitals uses a competing paging service. Page 1 uses TAP to send the disaster page to its competitor for relay to the hospital.
"We're using the priority paging feature on the Series 2000 for the disaster pages," Lawrence adds. "We've got about 7,000 customers on our paging system. You can get a page in 20 seconds to 2 minutes."
Stuck in traffic? Check your pager:
To date, the Disaster Page system has been providing fast and efficient warnings of chemical spills, severe weather, and tornado warnings. Another service Ron Lawrence is trying to add to his Disaster Page system will put traffic reports on pagers.
"Three interstates meet in Charleston," Lawrence says. "Last week a crane fell off a truck and blocked the eastbound lanes of one interstate. A dump truck west of town turned over and blocked westbound traffic. Then a tanker had a chemical spill north of here. Between the three accidents we were shut down for about four hours. It would have been really neat to have had traffic reports on the pagers."
Business is booming:
If the disaster page system is a booming success, so is Page 1's regular paging business. Despite the demise of the large national paging carriers, Page 1 has shown steady growth every year and is still growing. Lawrence attributes paging's continued good health to its unbeatable reliability, low cost and excellent coverage.
"We've seen some churn, but we're still growing in the private use of pagers," Lawrence says. "People are coming back to pagers because of the cost and because paging works. Here in the mountainous terrain of West Virginia, it's really difficult to get good coverage with cellphones. They have a lot of this problem. Within a 50-mile radius of Charleston we have probably 19 transmitters. Our Morgantown shop is 150 miles north by interstate. We can use the Zetron Z-link program to initiate a test page every two minutes. You'll get every page from here to there. None of the other guys can do that."
Paging goes online:
To keep its competitive edge, Page 1 has added a host of enhancements to its paging service. These include E-mail Notification, which notifies you by pager that you have an e-mail waiting. E-mail Text, which sends the text of your e-mail to your alphanumeric pager. Also new is Internet Paging, which lets users send a message to another Page 1 customer from the company's website at www.page1wv.com.
Other features include Stormpage and Weather Alerts. These include Local Weather Forecasts, which send the local forecast to your alphanumeric pager. Also available are Severe Weather Alerts, which can be sent to your alphanumeric pager.
The road to reliability:
Page 1 has been relying on Zetron paging terminals for some years now, but it didn't begin that way.
"We started out with a small paging terminal good for 1,000 customers and three trunks," Lawrence remembers." We just had voice and digital paging. People were requesting alphanumeric paging, so we started researching and evaluating terminals. We found a used Glenayre for sale in California that was brand new and had all the bells and whistles. We could have purchased it for $9,000, but when we called Glenayre we found that they didn't support their products beyond a certain number of upgrades. Plus, they wanted $40,000 to upgrade a terminal that wasn't even a year old yet. We also talked to Unipage. They had some good qualities, but in the end we came down to Zetron for the price and the quality. Our decision has proven itself in the end. We've had no failures that I know of. When it comes to paging terminals, Zetron is the only one."
[Please note that this a re-print of a Zetron newsletter from September 2002. The specifications and other technical information mentioned here may have changed in the last six years. The ideas for Disaster Paging Alerts are just as valid now as they were then.]
News, opinions, opportunities, and products to help your business grow. |
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The 2000 Series Paging Terminals are Zetron's top-of-the-line paging terminals. They offer the system operator an affordable platform upon which sophisticated features and extensive capacity can be built. These paging terminals are incrementally expandable so a system can start small and grow to support up to 58 telco trunks, 8 radio channels, and 50,000 pagers.