There are two packet radio services that work with the
AllPoints card. One is formerly known as ARDIS which
is a wholly owned subsidiary of American Mobil
Satellite. They offer their network as a two-way
service for pagers.
The other network is formerly known as RAM, which is
now owned by BellSouth. Currently the only company
that is offering any kind of comprehensive service for
these networks is "Go America" (see their website
under the same name) There are other smaller ones, but
most of them just re-sell the Go America services.
What makes this service desirable?
Well, it's wireless. The signal (where it exists) is
powerful and has deep penetration inside buildings.
The transmission from nearby towers is sent from
multiple towers, thereby assuring that transmissions
go through! It's secure! The possibility of
intercepting all packets being sent from all possible
towers (I've seen transmitted packets coming from up
to 5 seperate towers) is pretty slim, giving an
inherrant level of security.
What does it do?
Email...full text only. Plus, you can send web page
requests. Send a URL to a specific address and it will
return the text of the webpage as an email. you can
follow links on the page as well! Receive and send
faxes. voicemail translated to email and transmitted
to the PDA.
There may be more features, but it's been 3 years
since I used the service.
A little history on the packet data networks:
The company that started this is ARDIS. It was a 50/50
owned company jointly owned by IBM and Motorola. The
network was designed for IBM technicians to have full
building penetration of wireless service so that they
can service customer's computers and retain
connectivity to the corporate databases. IBM developed
a query/response system that returned data from the
database based on the parameters sent through an
email-style interface/transmission. This network was
opened to public use and Motorola soon purchased IBM's
half of the company in the early '90s. Motorola pushed
it's network strongly when a rival network, RAM,
entered into the arena. ARDIS sold network services to
pager companies like MobileComm, and RAM sold network
services to companies like PageNet. Both companies
sold to SPRINT! When RAM began to take the lead, and
Motorola was really hurting (Iridium ring a bell)
Motorola decided to get out of the "modem" business
(Motorola no longer makes modems...really pissed off
Cardinal...) and sold ARDIS to American Mobile
Satellite. This was a perfect fit for this company who
offers world-travellers anywhere communications
through MEO and LEO satellites! Now they were able to
offer data transmissions earth bound! I don't know if
they are still offering anything to the public any
longer.
RAM, was offering their service through two companys
called DTS and Wynd. Wynd was the premier packet data
network and I really enjoyed dealing with their
customerservice people! When Wynd began changing their
business model, I later switched to DTS. Their service
was identical to Wynd, and their customer service,
while not as knowledgable, were very good to deal
with. And while DTS never officially supported
Newtons, you could use the WyndMail client software
making the necessary modification (hidden in a special
3-tap selection process) to connecto the the
DTS servers. DTS later (around 1995 or 96) sold their
stake to Go America. At around the same time, RAM sold
out completly to BellSouth. Go America, at this time
still offered access to Newtons...but through
conversations with the owner of the company Andy told
me that he would be focusing the company on more
mainstream devices...seeing that the Newton never
really had what may be called a victorious following
in the PDA market, I really had no argument!
As far back as April 1999, I knew that Go America
still offered service to Newtons, using the WyndMail
client and the special modification mentioned above,
you could still use the Go America service.
Andy later told me that he was loosing revenue on
machines that didn't use their software because they
had no method of tracking packet use (payment is based
on the number of packets you request from the
network...prices went as high as 36 cents per packet
(a little less than 2kb in size) You can quickly see
that this was not an inexpensive product...Go America
then ceased to support the existing network
configuration and went to IP based connectivity...This
effectivly cut the Newton out of the loop...The
Wyndmail application was not IP based...
Earlier conversations with people on this list
confirmed this and Go America is no longer a friend of
the Newton!
Ed
web/gadget guru
--- Victor Rehorst <victor_at_newtontalk.net> wrote:
>
>
> So I haven't gotten around to doing any major
> hacking about with the
> Allpoints card now that I have it, but I have been
> doing a ton more
> research about Mobitex, RAM, and other related
> things in an effort to see
> if there are any actual useful applications out
> there for these cards.
>
> My preliminary conclusion is: nothing.
>
> I can't find any public services still in existence
> that would be usable
> from an AllPoints card. RadioMail is totally gone.
> WyndMail has
> transformed into Wynd communications, a company
> selling two-way pagers to
> deaf customers.
>
> The only thing really still using Mobitex are RIM
> Blackberry devices, and
> probably a host of specialized mobile applications
> for various companies.
>
> So, can anyone tell me how one would get any useful
> services for one of
> these cards? If there's nothing, then I'm not even
> going to bother trying
> to hack a driver.
>
> --
> Victor Rehorst - victor_at_newtontalk.net -
> chuma_at_chuma.org
=====
note: This does not constitute a sig file...
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