In 1986 Taiwan had a total of 10,000 pagers in use. They went to public tender for new infrastructure to support 500,000 subscribers. One of the bidders wrote a letter to the Taiwanese government telling them that the system was too big, that they would never use all that capacity. I sold the new system to them. It was a joint effort between, Spectrum Communications for the Paging Terminal equipment, Quintron for the Base Stations, and Multitome U.K. for the pagers.
Today there are close to three million pagers in use.
They have expanded the paging infrastructure a half a dozen times. All of a sudden, using a pager became cool, and everyone wanted one. In 1990 one of the several pager dealers there bought 526,000 pagers. In 1990 while pager factories around the world ran three shifts just to supply Taiwan, Brazil with a population of 158 million, imported only 306 pagers. But that all changed quickly.