Scall
Scall was an officially (unofficially until 2009) operated pager service in Germany from 1994 to 2002 .
history
Scall was put into operation in 1994 by DeTeMobil GmbH , Bonn. In 2000 the Scall service was sold to the company eMessage together with the Cityruf service and Skyper . This officially stopped the service in mid-2002.
Some Scall recipients could still be reached by SMS from the T-Mobile network until November 2009 . Now the numerous existing Scall receivers are being converted into receivers for the frequencies of the 70 cm band in amateur radio . The devices whose call ID starts with a "1" can also be operated as eCityruf receivers in the Cityruf network .
Competitive situation
The pager service enjoyed a certain popularity in the mid-1990s, when cell phone calls were not yet widespread. In addition to the Scall service, which, like Cityruf at the beginning , was operated by Deutsche Telekom , there were similar services from Miniruf GmbH ( Quix ) and Deutsche Funkruf GmbH ( TeLMI ). The target group were young people (the customer was used in the operating instructions ).
technology
Each Scall receiver had a chargeable telephone number with the area code 01681. The caller could only transfer the digits 0–9 to the entry-level model Scall XS via keypad or voice input (the pound key generated a hyphen). Later, it was for each Scallempfänger a voice box , a kind of answering machine that could be reached on the landline, furnished. In addition, it has been possible in recent years to use the subject line of an e-mail to send digit sequences free of charge to recipient number @ scall.de.
The Scall XT and Scall XTS models enabled the reception of alphanumeric messages, similar to the Cityruf, TelMI (with TelMI Top and TelMI Pro receivers), Quix and Skyper services .
A Scall XT cost 139 DM in August 1997, the Swatch watch with built-in Scall receiver (Swatch the Beep) around 200 DM. The disadvantage was that reports were officially only within a radius of 25 km (but the real ranges were often significantly greater ) to receive the specified place of residence. If a user wanted to receive messages at a different location, he had to enter the relevant zip code via a chargeable telephone number (area code 01680). Outside of the currently registered area, the device was useless. In contrast to the SMS , the message was not delivered asynchronously . In the last few years it was possible to change the postal code for free via a website.
swell
- ↑ Uwe Vogel: Scall pager service is discontinued. In: Heise Newsticker . April 9, 2002, accessed September 10, 2016 .
- ^ Henning Gajek: Scall radio call service finally shut down. In: teltarif.de . November 15, 2009, accessed September 10, 2016 .