NTT DoCoMo Inc. said Monday it will stop offering pager services at the end of March 2007, pulling the plug on the nearly 40-year-old business due to decreasing subscribers.

DoCoMo, the only company offering pager service across Japan, said it has decided to terminate the loss-making service as half the current subscribers seldom or never use it and because it is possible to alternate it with other services such as Internet hookups via cell phones.

The mobile phone operator stopped accepting new subscriptions for the pager service in June 2004.

The pager service, which Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corp. launched in 1968, initially targeted corporate users. The public entity was privatized in 1985 and became NTT Corp. DoCoMo is a major firm of the NTT group.