By Janice Tai 
 

CABBY Edmund Tan's Motorola walkie-talkie phone is not only a device which helps him make a living. It also turned out to be a life-saver in an emergency.

Mr Tan, 43, once received a distress call on his walkie-talkie from a fellow cabby who was wounded in a robbery.

After alerting the police, he headed straight for her. Fortunately, she had only minor injuries.

 
'She was so relieved that many taxi drivers offered to help in various ways, because of the islandwide walkie talkie network,' he said.

That incident convinced Mr Tan of the versatility of walkie-talkies and he later went to the islandwide walkie-talkie service provider GRID, and bought not one, but 4 sets of GRID walkie-talkies.

For Mr Tan, he wants to maximise his chances of getting a taxi-booking job by tuning in to as many GRID talkgroups as possible.

And his decision proved to be the right one.

To date, he says that his daily income has grown because he has been getting about 10 additional taxi-bookings each day.

Mr Tan has about 140 fellow Mecedes Benz taxi drivers in the GRID talkgroup, and they can all talk to each other at a push of a button on their handsets.

If a taxi driver is unable to take up a job, he can then voice broadcast the job opportunity through the GRID talkgroup. And the nearest cabby can then swing by to pick up the fare.

Said a grinning Mr Tan: 'We also use the network for our lunches and teas. Of course this is only for my own talkgroup. Otherwise how to invite hundreds of drivers for lunch at the same place!'

And he does not incur high phone charges because for just $48 per month, he could use his handset 24 hours daily.

'This translates to only $1.60 per day. I get to tune in all day for free and I rarely exceed the 1250 talkgroup minutes if I broadcast the call.'

Even if he exceeds this limit, the excess charge is only 1 cent per minute, and it is based on per-second billing.

His Motorola i580 handset also functions as a mobile phone which he uses to call his relatives and friends who do not have walkie-talkies.

The Motorola i580 is not only slim and sleek, it also comes with a camera, MP3 player, SD Card and Bluetooth which enables him to use his wireless earpiece.

For GRID's walkie-talkies, its crystal-clear reception can be received islandwide.

This is superior to using GSM to make conference calls, in which the caller needs to set up the calls one-by-one. A typical 3-party conference call can take a few minutes to set up, compared to an instant conference call of over 100 users by using GRID the talkgroup.

They can be used in a wide array of industries. It is also used to coordinate major events such as the National Day Parade.

Companies also use the walkie-talkie to send jobs to its mobile workers, track the where-about of their workers and allow their workers to clock-in for work wherever they are.

With the GPS position of the worker registered during clock-in, the companies need not worry about the worker pretending to be at the work-site when they are at somewhere else.

Companies that are currently using GRID's walkie talkies include major banks, shipyards, five-star hotels and those in the transport and security industry.

Besides standard walkie-talkie, GRID also offers intrinsically safe walkie-talkie for use in the petrochemical plants in Jurong Islands.

 http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/news/story/0,4136,128400,00.html