Next Mobile sees subscriber base doubling this year

Next Mobile Inc. (NMI), the country’s only provider of digital multi-way walkie-talkie, is aiming to more than double its subscriber base this year with the launch of its latest offering.

IMX UGC365, short for Unlimited Group Call for 365 days, is a hybrid plan, which provides instant communication with members of selected workgroups sharing a common need to communicate. The IMX phones can make unlimited conference calls to a specific workgroup or even to the entire team with a push of a button.

NMI currently has 5,000 corporate accounts and 25,000 handsets in the market. It was recently granted full cellular mobile telephone system (CMTS) status by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC).

Company officials said unlike analog radios, IMX UGC365 comes with a special feature called the 10G, a feature unique to the IMX dispatch service. It is a tool that helps organize group coordination and gives business enterprises the advantage of systematically positioning their operations into workgroups of 10 members. This way, only relevant information for a specific workgroup is passed on and relayed over the radio.

The one-time payment of P 18,000 for the service is already inclusive of a free handset (Motorola i215), one-year unlimited conference/group call, multiple talkgroups or 10 members, and the option to do private dispatch and interconnect via IMX postpaid or prepaid services.

"The introduction of the 10G feature via the IMX UGC365 is sure to revolutionize group communications and will help a company optimize its calling efficiency," NMI president Lambert Ramos said.

Earlier, NMI chief technology officer Henrik Nyqvist noted that the company’s technology is now based on 2.5G and can easily be upgrade to 3G or the third generation of mobile communications technology.

Company CEO Mel Velarde added that with the grant by the NTC of a CMTS license, NMI’s dominant leadership in the trunked-radio business can now extend to other key market segments that value the superiority of its technologies and the uniqueness of its products and services. "We can compete with the big telcos by being narrow minded in choosing the market niches where we think we can win," Velarde pointed out.