Swissphone partners with RACOM, seeks dealers to spread its digital-paging solution in the U.S.

With the base station and backup battery power integrated in a compact form factor that fits in a 19-inch rack, installation of the Swissphone solution is relatively simple, Stadler said. In addition, the small size and lower height requirements of the Swissphone transmitters mean that they can be placed in a wide variety of locations, including light poles and the sides of buildings, Miller said.

Another advantage of the Swissphone DiCal paging system is that deployment does not require the complexities associated with multiple vendors to develop an integrated solution, Stadler said.

“It’s just an easy, turnkey solution from one source,” Stadler said. “If you build a [typical analog paging] system today with traditional products in the market, you have to do kind of a puzzle. You have to get the base station from this supplier, the dispatch center from another supplier, the pager comes from a third supplier, and so on. It can be difficult to fit all of the puzzle pieces together.

“With the system solution, you just need two pieces: the paging network controller and the base station—that’s it. And everything is completely integrated with the monitoring and the software configurations, so you don’t need any other products to supervise the system or to monitor the backhaul infrastructure.”

Under the agreement with Swissphone, RACOM will be in charge of selling the digital-paging solution in a 12-state area covering the north central U.S., Miller said. In this role, RACOM will seek other dealer partners to install the Swissphone technology.

“We’re trying to sell this to end-user public-safety agencies, but we’re also doing this to help dealers of all brands—whether it is Harris, Kenwood, Motorola or whatever—sell it to an end user,” Miller said. “We think it has got a lot of application, and we’d love to help smaller dealers sell it.

“These dealers probably have fire customers that are unhappy with their current paging system and are looking for an alternative. As a dealer, you can give your customer better coverage at a lower cost, more functionality, a lower-priced pager. At the same time, dealers can get your standard dealer equipment margins that you can from all of your other manufacturers. We’ve designed the program so that there is ample margin for the end dealer, as well.”

Miller said that dealers interested in partnering with RACOM should contact Terry Brennan—RACOM’s vice president of marketing and sales—at [email protected].

Stadler said that dealers in other parts of the U.S. can get more information about potential partnerships with the company at www.swissphone.com.