A group of 24 vendors including AT&T Wireless Services, NEC Corp and Panasonic have proposed a standard for Narrowband-PCS (personal communications services ) two-way paging and messaging to rival Motorola Inc’s Flex protocols. The non-profit industry group, called pACT (personal air communications technology) Vendor Forum, says it wants to provide an open alternative to the Flex protocols, which must be licensed from Motorola. pACT says it’s hopeful that Motorola will join up. We would welcome Motorola’s participation, the organization said. Not a chance, Motorola said yesterday. Motorola already has 30 manufacturers worldwide using its Flex protocols – which cover one-way and other communication in addition to PCS. Motorola says it licenses Flex, which it calls the de facto standard for high-speed communication, to any firm that wants it and charges a nominal fee to cover administrative costs. The biggest false rumor being

spread by AT&T is that you have to pay to license the Flex family, said Al Briancon, VP and director of Flex architecture at Motorola. He added that Motorola has been asking to look at the pACT specification for more than a year, and has been denied, even after it offered to sign a non-disclosure agreement. pACT was developed by AT&T and is based on cellular digital packet data (CDPD) which allows packets of data to be mixed in and sent alongside regular cellular data. The protocols are used by companies which develop wireless, two-way data and voice messaging services such as pagers, personal digital assistants, PC cards, voice messaging and telephony applications. Narrowband-PCS was established by the US Federal

Communications Commission (FCC) when it auctioned nationwide personal communications freqency bands to paging companies. Motorola has 25KHz and 50KHz speeds; pACT has 12.5KHz and 50KHz. So far SkyTel Corp is the only company with a Narrowband-PCS two-way messaging service and it uses Motorola’s protocols. But the pACT group says LanSer Telecom and AT&T have announced they will use the pACT standard in upcoming products. pACT said it

will announce more members at its next meeting, September 17 at the PCS ’96 convention in San Francisco.