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Vodafone Paging Network Closure

Vodafone closes down their paging network.

Vodafone have announced that they will be closing their wide-area national paging network by 31st March 2018. This means that any Vodafone Paging customers who have not made alternative arrangements will lose their paging service on this date.

Vodafone will shut down its pager network by the end of the after reaching an impasse with competition watchdogs over plans to offload the 1,000 customers still using the ageing service to Capita.

Remaining subscribers including NHS trusts will be forced to make their own arrangements to continue to use pagers, which collapsed in popularity as mobile phones entered the mainstream in the late 1990s.

Vodafone has maintained a separate pager radio network and service for a dwindling hardcore, but last year decided to shut the service down and transfer the customers to the only other remaining operator and reassign its three staff.

The telecoms giant criticised a decision by the Competition and Markets Authority to launch a full-scale investigation of its deal with Capita, branding the move as “surprising”. Vodafone said it had warned regulators it intended to exit the pager market and scrap its network whether or not it was allowed to sell its customer base.

A spokesman said: “Due to the expense involved with a prolonged investigation, Vodafone will not pursue the transaction and has made the decision to close down this business, which is based on ageing, standalone technology no longer supported by network vendors.

“We will do our utmost to minimise the impact on the 1,000 or so customers still using the service.”

Vodafone has been in talks with regulators for months but became frustrated by detailed requests for information it could not provide, according to sources close to the attempted sale to Capita.

For instance, the CMA demanded to know the hypothetical price of a new pager, prompting protests from Vodafone which has not sold any for several years and did not intend to re-enter the beeper market.

Capita said it was “disappointed” in the failure of the deal.

What happens now?

Everyone who has been using the Vodafone pager gateway for their alarm systems and monitoring TAP to SMS text messaging alerts is being told by Texecom and Honeywell to move to the OpenTAP gateway. OpenTAP has been established since 2012 and was endorsed by Texecom and Honeywell in 2013 after reliability tests proved stable for the vast market of TAP gateway messaging users.

How do you switch to OpenTAP?

Simply change the Vodafone access number for the OpenTAP gateway access number 09018600011 and that’s all you need to do! Your TAP to text messaging should continue as normal.

OpenTAP is a managed TAP gateway with customer support, so if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us on (+44) 08081176736 or send us a message.

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