Last figure I was quoted by region was $30 per pager per month to have it 'active'
That is why it is so important to do a pager audit regularly, so lost and damaged pagers can be removed from the database, and not charged for, and these dollars can be spent elsewhere
MrT
it doesn't work like that, but some staff present those type of numbers as a simplified description. GRN paging is part of the overall GRN contract, managed by Justice (AGD) not CFS. CFS have a set sum taken from their budget by Justice and given to Motorola each year for everything GRN. I think paging (last I heard) was around $3 to $4 million per year total for CFS. So the $30pm figure comes from some people dividing the totals by the number of pagers issued to CFS but of course it's not that simple. If we add or remove pagers from the fleetmap up to a certain point we don't get charged any more or less but if CFS was to add say 500 extra pagers then Justice would likely increase the amount they take. I'm not convinced if numbers were reduced the charge would decrease but it's never happened yet so who knows.
Anyway I would look at hutchison/three/voda for paging for something like St John I reckon in preference to GRN. GRN paging overall is good but has drawbacks, eg. it is expensive, it's only in SA (and slightly over the border) and there are limitations on what hardware (eg. pagers, decoders etc) you can use both imposed by the govt/motorola and due to the fact it's flex rather than the more common pocsag protocol, and programming changes are expensive if done under the contract (your organisation could do it themselves if you have eg. the apollo pagers though).
