Re: SENDPAGE to ordinary paging company

[David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>]

> 
> Chris, the paging feature is designed to page alphanumeric pagers; there is a 
> direct computer to computer (i.e. modem) interface and that is what HylaFAX 
> is trying to use.   You need to find out what that telephone number is and 
> use that instead.

Although you are quite right that sendpage only supports the IXO/TAP
protocol, it is a fact that, in the UK at least, there are paging services
which do not offer any modem interface.

These are generally, contract free, calling party pays ones, aimed at
students, and the general domestic market, but also used for low volume
use by companies.  Typically these get their revenue by being charged at
a premium rate (UK rates are more limited than US ones) and forcing a
minimum call duration by using an un-interruptible voice announcement.
(I suspect it might be possible to maintain the revenue with a modem
service, but they would probably prefer to have that sort of user on
contract services.)

People have successfully accessed these with a computer, but to
do so you have to put a fairly accurately timed delay between the
paging service number and the message number; too short and it collides
with the voice announcement and is lost; too long and the service drops
into a speech recognition mode.

People have also used voice modems to speak messages to the alphanumeric
equivalents of these services; they've used short messages and repeated
them twice.

Accessing numeric only services doesn't really need a special program,
even the basic chat command, used for dialling PPP and SLIP calls,
will do.  The difficulty is getting the right pause in the middle of
the digit string, not in doing any clever formatting of the data.

There may be a wish list item for Hylafax here, namely the ability to
queue arbitrary job types to an outgoing modem.