The Spanish Government’s Telecommunications Office, having twice rejected all competitive bids for a national radio-paging licence, has finally granted this honour to Sistelcom Telemensaje, which will offer the first of three national radio-paging services that were envisaged under the National Telecommunications Plan. Madrid-based Sistelcom is a telecommunications consortium belonging to the Central Hispano Group, which was set up in 1991 to design and operate advanced telecommunications services within the framework marked out by the government’s liberalisation of the telecommunications market. The group is made up of Union Electrica Fenosa SA, Dragados y Construcciones SA, Fuerzas Electricas de Cataluna SA, Banco Central HispanAmericano SA and Instalaciones y Proyectos de Telecomunicacion SA. More recently the group came to an agreement with Pacific Telesis International, whereby the latter took a 25% share in the company’s capital. Sistelcom started the service on January 12, four months after signing a contract with the administration. It envisages covering 40% of the Spanish population initially, rising to 70% this autumn. Users will be able to travel as far afield as Andorra, France and Portugal with the same pager. To operate the service Sistelcom has set up a National Management and Operations Centre, seven regional centres, which receive the calls, process, multiplex and send them to the central system, a series of base stations, six 9,600bps tie lines to connect the national centre and the regional centres, and signal distribution tie lines via satellite. Sistelcom general manager Jesus Prieto said that this will be the first time that a radio-paging service has used satellite for the transmission of messages. Manging director Albero Sandoval places the potential market at 100,000 users, predicting that this will rise to 600,000 subscribers over the next 10 years, of which it is hoped that some 300,000 will use Sistelcom’s system. Sistelcom’s president, Victoria Reinoso, announced that investment in the new system was running at some $3.5m per annum, and acknowledged that the system would run at a loss for the first two years.
