Telephones & Pagers

A pager is an electronic device used to contact people via a paging network. It pre-dates mobile phone technology, being most popular during the 1980s and 1990s, but similarly uses radio transmissions to communicate between a control/call center and the recipient. more...

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Many of today's pagers use the FLEX on-air protocol. The slower POCSAG on-air protocol is still used for some pagers in the United States and probably in other countries.

Uses

Pagers remain in use to notify part-time emergency personnel. For example, they are required to be used by UK lifeboat men and retained firefighters. In this use, they can be thought of as a modern equivalent of maroon rockets. On a smaller scale, pagers are sometimes carried by staff in medical establishments, allowing them to be summoned to emergencies.

Pager subscriptions have been on the decline since the widespread availability of mobile phones and their ability to send and receive text messages based on short message service (SMS is used in large hospital complexes, where cellular coverage is often weak or nonexistent, and where radio transmitters may interfere with sensitive medical equipment.

Pagers also have privacy advantages compared with cellular phones. Since a one-way pager is a passive receiver only (it sends no information back to the base station), its location cannot be tracked. But this can also be a disadvantage, since a message sent to a pager must be broadcast from every paging transmitter in the pager's service area. Thus, if a pager has nationwide service, a message sent to it could be intercepted by criminals or law enforcement agencies anywhere within the nationwide service area.

Pager technology is now used in irrigation control systems and for traffic signals.

Functionality

Early pagers only provided an audio notification, such as a series of bleeps, to indicate reception of a page. The paged party then had to telephone the control/call centre to collect the message either from an operator or an early voice mail device.

Some early models included an analog audio receiver and speaker; upon receiving a page the speaker would activate, and the user would hear a human voice reciting their message. Later pagers used digital messages, first numeric and later alphanumeric, to provide the recipient with more information.

Even more recent models included the ability to send messages in a two-way fashion and even included the ability to send and receive email. Many paging operators also support WCTP for sending and receiving messages from 1.5, 1.7 and two-way pagers. This is called two-way paging.

Many paging network operators now allow numeric and textual pages to be submitted to the paging networks via email. This is convenient for many users, due to the widespread adoption of email; but email-based message submission methods do not usually provide any way to ensure that messages have been received by the paging network. This can result in pager messages being delayed or lost. Older forms of message submission using the Telocator Alphanumeric input Protocol protocol involve modem connections directly to a paging network, and are less subject to these delays. For this reason, older forms of message submission retain their usefulness for disseminating highly-important alerts to users such as emergency services personnel.

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