DSS Mobile, Punwire Paging announce tie-up to provide roaming services
Paging operators in the country are gearing up to garner more subscribers by offering roaming services across different cities.
DSS Mobile Communications and Punwire Paging Services yesterday announced a tie-up to provide roaming facilities across 110 cities in the country. EasyCall, the paging brand being offered by the Mumbai-based Natelco group of companies, is offering a similar service across the 25 cities its holds a licence in.
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Other paging operators are also working on alliances with one another to offer countrywide roaming, sources said. Subscribers to the roaming service will be able to move across the cities and be contacted on a single pager number.
All that the subscriber has to do is ring up the paging operator and let us know which city he is travelling to. Then all his pager messages will be routed to the city he is in, said Gurpal Singh, vice chairperson and managing director, Punwire.
DSS Mobile, the countrys largest paging service provider, is operational under the Mobilink brand in ten cities, which accounts for 70 per cent of intercity traffic. The cities are Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune, Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Kanpur.
Punwire, which offers its paging service using the Page Me brand, operates in 12 states in the country. The paging licences in the states are held by two group companies Punwire Paging Services and Punwire Mobile Communications.
The Mobilink-Page Me alliance offers a flexible tariff package. The national package allows unlimited usage across all 110 cities for Rs 1,000 a month, while a state-wide usage will cost Rs 500, said Pravin Kumar, managing director of DSS Mobile. Cities in addition to the subscribers home-city would come at an additional cost of Rs 50-100 a month, he added.
On the other hand, EasyCall is offering its 25-city roaming service at an additional Rs 250 per month. Other paging operators are also likely to announce usage tariffs in this range, sources added.
aging operators hope to enhance their revenues with the new product offering. The additional revenues, operators hope, will boost their sagging cash flows. The Mobilink-Page Me alliance expects 10-20 per cent of their subscribers to subscribe to the roaming service, Kumar said.
Of late, paging operators are also offering bulk-paging solutions to corporate clients. RPG Paging has set up an alarm warning system in the process plant of Air Liquide and is in the midst of implementing a booking service for LPG (liquid petroleum gas) cylinder consumers in Ahmedabad. RPG Paging operates in Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai.