TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Using Cell Phone as Pager

Re: Using Cell Phone as Pager

Fred Atkinson (fatkinson@mishmash.com)
Sat, 15 Jan 2005 10:51:01 GMT

I was at SkyTel in their Technical Operations department when they
deployed Two-Way paging. It used a variation of the FLEX paging
protocol that was called ReFLEX. ReFLEX was FLEX with characters
added to it that allowed for two way communications. Those pagers had
separate transmit and receive frequencies.

I had one of the first prototypes (before it was even made available
to the public) and it was very bulky. But I suspect they've gone a
long way since then and are probably more compact. They did come out
with pagers that only handshaked on the two-way system. They sent an
acknowledgement when the page was received. And if they couldn't
locate the pager (if it was outside of coverage area or turned off),
the system would hold the page until it could get an acknowledgement
from the pager.

The sender could get an acknowledgement as to whether or not the page
had been received in either of the above cases. But, I left SkyTel
before that really got off the ground.

Regards,

Fred

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