Dear Friends and wireless professionals,

I have some interesting news for you this week, but first my regular disclaimer:

This is my weekly newsletter about Wireless Data and Radio Paging. You are receiving this message because you have either communicated with me in the past about a wireless topic, or your address was included in another e-mail that I received. This is not a SPAM. If you have received this message in error, and you are not interested in these topics, please click here, then click on "send" and you will be promptly removed from the mailing list.

Please feel free to forward this to anyone who might be interested.

BBL EQUIPMENT
I had a very interesting telephone call this week from a building manager on the east coast. She was a nice lady that had found me by searching for "BBL" on the Internet. The search had turned up my resume since I worked for BBL Industries in Atlanta back in the days when they were the leader in paging control terminals. Anyway, she said that her tenants had abandoned their part of the building and had left all this equipment there. So she wanted to know if the big blue boxes with "BBL" on them were worth anything. I recommended that she get in touch with a local paging company and have them look at the "boxes." From her description over the telephone, it sounds like they were mostly empty.

PAGING TRADE ASSOCIATIONS
From what I hear there is a great deal of interest to merge two regional paging trade associations to form one nationwide association that would represent the interests of all the paging carriers. I have mentioned both the Allied PCIA and the AAPC in this newsletter before and I personally think that a new, merged organization would be good for our industry.

One very important issue is the continuation of the PTC (Paging Technical Committee). This group, under the auspices of the PCIA, has made major contributions to the paging industry. Composed of representatives from all the major carriers and equipment manufacturers, they have functioned very productively. The next generation of the ReFLEX protocol to come out of Motorola (version 2.7.2) was developed by this cross-industry technical group. It is essential that this group continue to function under the sponsorship of whatever new paging trade association that gets formed.

ReFLEX PAGERS
There is a lot of buzz about the status of two-way pagers. I hope that the technical and distribution issues get worked out quickly. I have heard that there are delegations from the major two-way carriers going over to South Korea for another visit next week. There are some very good people involved in this, so I am confident that there will be some interesting new products coming out soon. Last month Percomm issued a press release saying they had Motorola Licenses for the development of a ReFLEX™ chipset, a telemetry module, and subscriber devices. I heard that they have already been showing a subscriber device around. Those who have seen it say it looks pretty good. One unfortunate note: apparently the deal for Multitone to acquire the rights to manufacture Motorola's two-way pagers, the T900 and the P935, fell through. I was sorry to hear that.

WIRELESS E-MAIL
There is another entrant into the wireless e-mail arena, Good Technology Inc. Read about in both RCR News and Wireless Week. A couple of years ago some of our "industry leaders" embarrassed themselves by saying that wireless e-mail wasn't a good idea, even when their top technologists were recommending it.

CREATALINK TELEMETRY UNITS
Interest in the one-way CreataLinks is still running high. I found 300 of them the other day, and they were immediately spoken for. WaveWare Technologies here in Dallas has about 80 of them in stock. They are 900 MHz, with RS-232 and the external antenna jack, so they are relatively expensive. The price is $105 each. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find any CreataLinks anywhere. Until the, still-under-development units come out, we have to search around to find them. If you buy these from WaveWare, please mention my name.

MORE PAGING EQUIPMENT FOR SALE
A good friend in Mexico City, Enrique Llaca, the former manager of Motorola paging in Mexico, has found the following equipment for sale. Please let me know if you are interested in any of this.

If I may be of assistance as a consultant—to help out on a project—and maybe get it done faster, please read this and then get in contact with me.