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.
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pagers
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still a couple of niche markets...
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
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At my work.
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
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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:
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And They Pay You For Finding Them
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
- 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
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.
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
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...
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how can you get such a long delay? what provider are you using?
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Re:
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
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Pagers are still reliable
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
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Hospital Paging
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Hospital communication needs to do a whole lot more than paging
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cell phones considered unreliable
Pagers will not die until a more reliable alternative comes along. If pagers were larger and more expensive than smart phones they would still have significant usage. This is because some roles (ie the only sysadmin in a dot com company) MUST get notifications.
If I had to pay hundreds of dollars a month to have my pager, I would.
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"Summer of Snowden" made me buy a pager again...
I'm actually loving it. Not that I could actually ditch a cell phone in this day and age, but I can at least pull the battery out of my cell and have a half hour "off the grid" here and there. In the meantime, my cell company has "message carbon copy," which copies my pages to my cell, for it's version of "assured messaging." SMS receipt turns all cell phones into "paging terminals" too.
A great tool to familiarize oneself with a again and to to to your mobile lifestyle on this post Edward Snowden age!
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