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Is The Good Old Pager Coming Down To Its Final Beeps?
from the out-to-pasture dept
It's been nearly five years since we reported that some people were still clinging tightly to their pagers, despite their obsolescence in many ways thanks to the mobile phone. Few companies still actually make the devices, and with so few users -- just 7.4 million nationwide -- once-thriving pager-repair businesses are now dwindling as well. That's hardly surprising; what is a little, though, is that pagers have continued to hang on. Their real strength is in the medical market, where doctors and hospitals still rely on them because they more reliably penetrate buildings, and they can be used in areas where cell phones are banned due to concerns they'll interfere with medical equipment (or interfere with hospitals' revenue from high-price in-room telephones for patients). But the days of the venerable pager look numbered: hospitals' attitudes about cell phone use are starting to shift, while many are installing WiFi-based systems that offer far greater functionality than simple paging.
Reader Comments
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pagers
there is no question pagers have many benefits, the main one in my mind was battery life - how many of you have a cell phone that runs for 3 months on a single AA battery? Although occasionally I missed a page, I never had one delayed, and text messages on cell phones can be delayed for days.
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As a Regional Medical Director for central/west Florida I can guarantee that we won't be getting rid of the pagers anytime soon. Blackberry, cellphones and WiFi are useful, but no-where near as reliable or cheap as a pager.
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still a couple of niche markets...
One area pager-like devices is still used is in public safety, especially in volunteer based departments. I'm a volunteer EMT and we still have pagers and no plans to change. They are cheap, very reliable, work almost everywhere, and since the information flow needed is all one way (it is how calls are dispatched), there's no need to move to a more sophisticated system.
As a general point I don't think the shift to consolidating communications to a single platform (primarily cell phones) is a good one just because you have no redudancy if/when there is tower damage and other disasters. I was on an ambulance in Manhattan on 9/11 and the thing that allowed us to maintain at least one way communications with our dispatch was the pager system. A lot of the cell tower support for lower Manhattan was sitting near or on the towers. In some instances, having a mix of communication outlets, some old and some new, is vital to maintain reliable communications for "can't fail" systems (like public safety).
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Pagers Rock
I am not sure about what technology pagers used, but I remember reciving pages in the basement level of a 10 story parking garage. I have to stand on one foot, face east, and pray to get my Cell to make a call when I am standing directly under my carriers tower. If they could get the pager signal to carry voice, Cell phones my be worth a damn.
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At my work.
I work at a casino and it is very effective there becuase it would be rude for a supervisor to answer a phone if it went off, however a page is a lot less intrusive.
They don't break, they don't die, and they do the job. Its like saying some day pens and pencils will be no more.
Until cell phones can be thrown at the ground without breaking, hold a three month carge and are so cheap that there would be no reason to steal it... pagers are here to stay.
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Other uses for pagers, and pager systems
I have noticed that Alarm Monitoring companies have begun using the pagers operating freq to alert them to breakin's and the like. They do this because professionals cut the phone/power lines, so this allows them to know when an alarm event is occuring using only a set of AA batteries that last over 3 months.
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Carlo,
You need to go back to school, and enroll yourself in English.
It read like a book report from a child who plagiarized the whole thing, and added some minor touches which throw it off.
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Re:
Not only are you posting anonymously, but not a single sentence of your post is grammatically correct. If you're going to be the sort of waste of space douchebag that suggests another person attend English classes, I recommend that you pick up a few yourself before posting again.
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Pagers without doubt have uses. Their simplicity and foolproofness is what gives them their use. In a one way information chain, they're invaluable. I would think they might also be useful as a trigger for bombs.....
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And They Pay You For Finding Them
Riding my bicycle one Sunday morning near a medical office, I happen to see a pager smack dab in the middle of an intersection. I stopped and picked up the then fairly new item and put it in my pack. When I got it home I dismantled it, like a good geek, and noticed a message with a phone number to call if found. I made the call, the company sent me a prepaid shipping box. About fifteen days later, I got a check for ten bucks!
I just hoped the doctor that left it on the roof of his car wasn't ever going to be MY surgeon.....
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Pagers are more reliable
Our IT department uses a pager for a number reasons;
- Easy to pass around between a group of people who each take a week with the pager
- More reliable then SMS (sometimes I've seen SMS messages take an hour to deliver)
- Less intrusive to the person carrying the pager. (I've got a page 10 minutes from home and simply waited till I got home, where I have my laptop and wifi, to call the person back )
- better coverage area. My pager works at my parents home, where by Rogers Blackberry gets some service in one room and none in the other.
I doubt we would move away from pagers unless we were forced to. We MIGHT then switch to a rotation with a small, standard cell phone.
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Re: Pagers are more reliable
We used to have "pager duty" rotation in my group, then about six years ago we switched to a 2-way pager because the monthly fee was cheaper, and you could send a simple response message back to the sender to ACK new requests or let them know you are an hour from the nearest PC and they'd better call somebody else.
Then about a year ago we replaced the pager with a blackberry. Same idea, but you can compose more detailed responses (like "It does this all the time, just hit reboot and then call me if it doesn't come back up").
Drawback is that the blackberry is MUCH less reliable than the 2-way pager. Coverage for GPRS service is not nearly as good, lots of dead zones that never bothered the pager.
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Pager systems will be lost to attrition.
I work in a building that houses classified material. When people are in the classified areas, two-way wireless communication (i.e. a cell phone) is prohibited. We rely on pagers to fill that gap, in our communication line.
Prior to this job, I worked for a major hospital. Because the paging services couldn’t guarantee timely delivery, and couldn’t provide logs, they invested in their own pager network. One central signal, and three repeaters cover most of the hills, and valleys in the region.
On the flip side…
As the number of pagers in use continues to diminish, it’s a natural presumption that pager networks will start to shutdown from simple attrition. It’s not cost effective to upkeep maintenance on the local repeater, and telephone network, not to mention taking up valuable space on the antenna mast.
I think we’ll see is a new form of pager emerging in the next few years. The pager will basically be a stripped down, one-way cell phone, for all intents, and purposes. This will enable them to run off a combination of analog, and digital networks. There is a fair amount of analog cellular signals available in most populous areas, that aren’t being used heavily because the digital counterparts are more effective.
The reason I’m leaning towards analog cellular signals being in the mix is that they tend to pass deeper into heavy construction, versus the digital signals.
Shane
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They work in a timely manner
When I was at an ISP, we had pagers. We could opt for a two way also.
One person could not receive the two way pagers so he had to use a one way.
Cell phones? How about 24 hour delays in delivery? We had a 15 minute response window. Missed calls got escalated up the management chain.
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If it ain't broke...
...don't fix it!!!
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Me a drug dealer. I fo sure an't gett'in rid of my beeper. It look cool and old scool...know what i'm saying.
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24 to 48hrs delay for a txt dellivery??? what are you talking about? my sister and i txt people all the time, not once has a message taken longer than 5 seconds to appear and no more than a minute to get a response.
how can you get such a long delay? what provider are you using?
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Re:
That's precisely the problem, Frank the Tank. Service varies depending on carrier, phone manufacturer - too many variables!
I have had messages not be delivered/received at all or hours and hours later - usually when txting between carriers. My sister and I text eaxh other frequently with no problems, but we are both using the same provider AND phones made by the same manufacturer. If messages didn't go through under those circumstances - well, that would be too ridiculous to contemplate.
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i suck
pagers suck use phones.
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Pagers are still reliable
I can't imagine a world without pagers. I am on call for a technical center, and cell phones have horrible coverage in some of the canyons and mountain areas I go when camping out on weekends. Never missed a page yet, even when my cell phone hasn't seen a single signal bar all weekend. I have tried Verizon and AT&T networks (the two biggies around here), neither offers the coverage of the pager.
What worries me is if enough people get rid of their pagers that the paging carrier begins to dismantle the system to save money and reduces coverage. So far, that has not happened, but I fear it might someday. Then, I'm hosed.
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Re: Pagers are still reliable
It has already started. USA Mobility has begun dismantling their network. I used to have 3 paging transmitters at one of my shops in CA, and they pulled them all out. They said it was to try and save money. So now, I have NO coverage at my shop or any of the surrounding areas! Also, my USA Mobility (used to be Metrocall) pager used to work well in the hills, now, nothing. Unless you in a major city, forget about USA Mobility's so-called 'nationwide' service.
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