Will you soon be haunted by your email wherever you go? You will! Or at least if DNS-Communications has anything to do with it, you will. DNS offers an emailing service for alpha numeric pagers. They set up an email box for you at their service (such as pagegareth@infohwy.com). When someone sends you an email message to your pager account, it's sent to your pager and copied to your regular email box. This is a great feature because with traditional paging, if you're in the bowels of some building and you get a page, it ends up bouncing off the walls of the building rather than into your pager. With DNS, if you miss a message at the pager, it's still saved in email. The messages you receive include the subject, the sender, and 85 characters of the message. You're supposed to get the email address of the sender too, but for some reason, this only worked part of the time on my unit. Also with your basic e-pager service comes a daily AP service of top news, sports, and weather (in 3 different sends).
 So, does it work? Yes and no. I had a very difficult time getting my account set up. DNS assured me that I was an anomalous case, but I wonder. Of all the pages I was sent, only about 70 percent of them made it to my belt...and it wasn't because I was deep in some subterranean cavern either, most of the time I was bathing in the warm glow of my monitor. Being handicapped, I don't get out much so I wasn't able to put the pager to an extensive road test. Even so, I was able to glimpse its usefulness on a micro scale: * I'm outside on the porch and I get a message that says the Street Tech WebBoard is up and I should have a look. Yay! * I'm downstairs watching TV and I get a message from someone asking if I'm still awake--and if I am--to call them. Awake?:yes, Discernible brainwave activity?: No. But I decide to return their call anyway. * I go car shopping (ugh) and get a very important message that a radio interview is in fact on and that I need to be back home by 3:30. * And then there was the first page I received: "WARNING! WARNING! This pager has been infected with PageBoom 1.0. The pager will explode in..." That Sean...such a kidder. With these and other messages, a few of the characters were lost and showed up on the 4-line pager screen as blinking squares. With the pager email this never proved to be a big problem, but it was for the AP news service. The sends were often so filled with garbage as to be unreadable. DNS said the AP service is from PageMart (DNS's pager service provider) and is a bonus with the email service. That's all well and good, but it's one of the features I really like, so the constantly garbled transmissions were very annoying. DNS says that PageMart is working on the problem. They also said that some of my reception problems may be due to living in such a highly populated area (Northern Virginia). Uh...hello!...don't most pager users live in highly-populated areas? DNS offers a number of different services: A full service with local alpha paging, numeric paging, and voice mail for $29.95/month (plus a $15 set-up fee); email paging only for $10/month (plus a $10 set-up fee); Info-Roam Service with nationwide paging, for an additional $9/month; an 800 beeper number for $6.50/month; and all of the above with live operator dispatch for $40/month. The Motorola alpha pagers run about $200 from DNS (or you can get one cheaper from an electronics discount house). If you're in a line of business where short field communications are common and timely and you want something cheaper than a cellphone, the email pager might make a lot of sense. Hopefully, the problems I had with my service will get ironed out soon. If I was a Webmaster--hey wait...now I am a Webmaster--an email pager would be very useful for keeping abreast of tech troubles on the site. So, if youčre having trouble with Street Tech, or if the server appears to be down, you know where to find me: pagegareth@infohwy.com. - Gareth Branwyn [7/4/97]
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