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Fireless might be the word but it is accompanied by a riot of acronyms - WAR, GPRS, W-CDMA, UMTS sufficient to baffle even a NASA astronaut
And then, in the midst of all the sound and fury, paging, the pioneering technology of wireless for the masses, has slipped quietly and almost unnoticed below the event horizon. Indeed, paging is now widely perceived as the poor relation, the also-ran; the technology for those who aren't quite up to the minute.
Ericsson, among several other manufacturers, certainly believes this to be true. It pulled out of the field at the end of 1998, and sees no reason to change its mind. "We saw that the kind of services that paging had offered in the past were moving onto mobile phones," says Ericsson Mobile Communications' marketing director Bo Albertson. He adds, "As radio communications evolves, there will be fewer and fewer places where you actually need a pager instead of a mobile, and we just don't see there will ever being a big enough volume to justify our continued involvement."
Mobile phones are gaining functionality as enhanced 2G and 3G mobile services are launched, and the various handsets will give way to one all-singing, all-dancing unit - and that won't be the pager.
Deborah Monas, international wireless analyst at UK-based consultancy Kagan World Media, is rather more empathetic than Albertson, but nonetheless believes that paging as a mass market application may have had its day. "It's probably going to become a niche market," she says, pointing to those - such as doctors and engineers - for whom guaranteed contactability is vital.
Even dyed-in-the-wool advocates for paging admit that things could be better. But not everyone is cast down. For example, Jacques Couvas, chairman of the European Public Paging Association (EPPA) - which in July merged with the ERMES (Europe's native paging standard) MoU Association in the hope of providing a united front - says that with more than 10 million pagers in daily active use in the Europe and 160 million operative around the world, the technology is far from dead.
However - and this is the telling point - he does describe the switch that some European countries were forced to make a few years ago...