SKY Telecom Services, the global messaging unit of Hongkong's First Pacific Group, is to get its long-awaited worldwide paging service off the ground in April.
The company, which has had a pilot programme of more than 100 users in the United States, Canada, Hongkong and Singapore running since last October, has so far invested more than $70 million in network infrastructure.
SkyTel, as the service is known, was granted a licence to operate the service in late 1991, but its launch was delayed while final re-seller arrangements were negotiated with local paging companies.
With those negotiations complete, the company expects to have 10,000 subscribers on the Hongkong network by the end of the year, according to the company's marketing director, Mr Allen Luu.
The SkyTel service, which will be offered to Hongkong pagers through existing paging companies like Hutchison and Star, will allow local users to receive messages while travelling overseas.
SkyTel will initially offer three services: SkyPage, a basic automatic numeric pager service; SkyTalk, a phone-in voice mail system, and SkyWord, a full-blown alpha-numeric messaging service capable of sending whole pages of information.