Bell Mobility is putting the bite back into paging with the January launch of a three-month test of new voice-paging technology in the Ottawa-Hull area.

The company expects to roll out the yet-unnamed service nationally in the second quarter of 1997.

Bell Mobility says the new technology, called inFlexion, provides better voice quality, reliability and efficiency than voice paging of the past. Because of its shortcomings, voice paging had been replaced by alpha-numeric pagers.

The new voice paging technology allows 30-sec. voice messages to be sent to a pager capable of storing up to four minutes of messages. Eventually, callers will have the ability to track the status of messages to determine whether they were listened to or received.

Voice paging is the first of many new paging services being developed by Mobility Canada, of which Bell Mobility is a member company.

Mobility Canada was awarded a licence by Industry Canada in December 1995 to develop paging services in the narrowband 900 MHz frequency.

There are no plans to advertise during the test but the campaign for the national launch will be handled by Cossette Communication-Marketing.