In a technology-obsessed country where people use their mobile phones to browse the Web, watch television and purchase goods, the pager, the simple wireless device that alerts the wearer to messages, is as fashionable as cave drawings.
The country’s number of pager users once reached over 15 million, but is now barely above 20,000. / Korea Times
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff reporter
In a technology-obsessed country where people use their mobile phones to browse the Web, watch television and purchase goods, the pager, the simple wireless device that alerts the wearer to messages, is as fashionable as cave drawings.
Now, the fate of pagers, once affectionately called by Koreans as "ppippi" (beep beeps), hangs on the persistence of a single company, Seoul Mobile Telecom, which by no means has found a bankable business model.
Seoul Mobile Telecom, which operates in Seoul and the neighboring metropolitan area, became the country's sole survivor in the pager market after Real Telecom, which provided nationwide coverage, went defunct in November last year.
The company, which has 23,000 subscribers paying 12,000 won per month, insists on remaining afloat, but some industry watchers are betting that it will end services after June next year, when it will be required to reapply for a frequency license.
As a business model, paging is clearly beyond the point of decay, and the difficulty for Seoul Mobile Telecom is that it has to provide its own pagers, as there are no manufacturers willing to produce the devices anymore. The company also has to spend a serious amount of money to improve its aging network.
"We have no intention to halt our paging services," said a Seoul Mobile Telecom spokesman.
Of course, representatives of Real Telecom had said the same thing. In an interview with this reporter a few years ago, Baek Kwang-jo, the chief executive of Real Telecom, was confident of carving a niche in the country's telecommunications market by focusing on corporate customers and data services. Now, Baek apparently has to do something else.
"After shutting down its paging service, Real Telecom showed responsibility by providing free services to its customers for a month. However, it will be difficult for pager users to be compensated," said an official from the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), the country's broadcasting and telecommunications regulator.
It's not that pager operators lacked in their attempts to adjust to the changing market. Instead of targeting regular consumers in a country with more mobile phones than heads, the companies targeted specific corporate markets, such as medical services, electronics and high-tech manufacturing industries where employees were banned from using phones in the workplace.
The operators had also managed to find a market in real-time stock information and traffic update services with content providers, but the popularity of smartphones and location-based mobile terminals has killed that market as well.
Started in 1982 by the state-run Korean Mobile Telecommunications Service, which is now SK Telecom, paging services were a booming business in the mid to late-1990s and played a significant role in expanding the country's telecommunication sector beyond fixed-line telephony.
Pager subscriptions reached their peak in 1997 with more than 15 million customers nationwide. That was a "cute" time when numerical messages such as "8282," meaning "hurry up," or "1212," which meant "buy me a drink" were part of common language.
But the pager market quickly diminished in the following years as mobile-phone services became cheaper and started to provide text messaging.
The number of pager customers dropped to 9.18 million in 1998, 3.3 million in 1999, 450,000 in 2000 and just over 50,000 in 2004, according to government figures. SK Telecom handed over its pager business to Real Telecom in 2001.
