Paging in the 20th and 21st Centuries

e*Message: A Chronicle in Short Chapters

The history of e*Message began in 2000, when the company was founded and took over Deutsche Telekom’s and France Telecom’s paging activities. In the course of the same year, e*Message modernised the paging networks with nationwide coverage in both countries and introduced satellite technology. This state-of-the-art infrastructure now forms the basis of various proven and newly developed services. Within less than one decade, the group with subsidiaries in Germany and France has become a leader in the continental European paging market. Moreover, e*Message operates a trunked radio network for voice and data communication in the Berlin-Brandenburg region. This chronicle highlights the different steps in the company’s success story.

Paging from the beginning to the present

In 1921 — sixty years after Philipp Reiss’s first telephone experiment and thirteen years after the first wireless telephone communication by the German Railway Authority — police officer William P. Rutledge developed a pager-like system in Detroit, USA. Within just a few years, all the city’s patrol cars were equipped with such “pagers”. They not only permitted rapid pursuit of criminals, but also helped to prevent crime.

Paging technology has considerably developed since this early stage …(more)