Motorola still makes pagers for public safety use. As mentioned fire departments and ems agencies use them. On duty station pagers are used to alert the firefighters on duty that day and they pass the station pager on to the oncoming shift; on call personnel (whether volunteer, paid call, or off duty career) carry pagers that are alerted by different tones.

I do for the hospital, and to track ambulances reported in the area. I know our FD uses them.

i use a motorola pager and a cell phone, but the pager always works, sometimes the cell doesn't.

and i'm an obgyn.

Hmm, usually at the hospitals it makes a huge difference, as my pager basically works all over while the cell doesn't

Yes....
 

My workplace uses 2-way pagers extensively, although there are also some 1-way pagers (numeric and alphanumeric) as well. 2-way ones work in most buildings (except large convention centers?), nationwide service. Cell phone doesn't work in my workplace unless you're near a window, except for bulky "in-house" cell phones.

Would love to have something newer with more features. Hope employer will go that route eventually.

Still carry Skytel 1-way pager - alert is tied to my Verizon voice mail - while roaming in the sticks have many, many times gotten a page announcing new VM while the cell phone is silent. This is especially true in Canada while roaming there. Much better penetration inside large buildings, too, which is due, I suspect, to the fact that 1-way pagers piggyback on commercial radio signals. I am told 2-way pagers run on cell networks, so you wouldn't have the redundant factor with those.
Belt+suspenders, I guess, but it works for me.

I own a telephone answering service business and can attest that most doctors still use pagers. A friend has a great paging company with around 200 transmitters blanketing the state of Wisconsin. His customers include nuclear power plants, hospitals, many doctors, telcos, the US Secret Service, etc.

At least until recently analog cell phones (800 MHz band) were banned in hospitals. The number of doctors using text messaging is increasing but not so much where there is good a paging system with good signal penetration in hospitals and decent customer service.

my partner uses text messaging with the cell phone but it ends up with her getting more telephone calls sometimes I like the 1 or 2 minutes i can wait to call back with the pager.

also for me sometimes the battery on my cell phone dies or whatever and that pager just keeps on runnning.

but i pay 20 a month just to have a pager so i might stop it soon because after 2 years i pretty much have bought and paid for that pager.

Good point re battery life, etc. The $20 a month could probably be reduced in half by a call to the paging company. I.e. we buy new alpha-numeric pagers for $65 or less. They know that.

By the way we pay around $15/month for air time and the signal pretty much covers the state of Wisc like a blanket with outstanding building penetration around hospitals. We are very fortunate in Wisconsin to have JSM Tele-Page - an outstanding Radio Common Carrier (RCC) providing paging service throughout the state.

PageNet (a national RCC business based in Plano, TX before they went bankrupt) ruined the paging business with their 950 MHz system and cheap prices. In order to compete other carriers had to lower prices to the point that they could not make enough money to build out their systems. Pagenet never make a cent before going bankrupt. On top of that 950 Mhz is not good for paging because, compared to VHF and UHF paging, there is no signal ground roll so you have to have four time as many transmitters and the transmitters are very expensive and you can't afford to buy the number needed for decent coverage. :confused:

On a side note:

Someone recently gave me his pager number (MD), and I asked him how to use it? Dial it just like a cell phone? I never did contact him on it, so I am still confused on the exact operation.

I think the discussion on this antiqicated technology is fun though, as I never experienced it, and is still useful today, although not as mainstream.

Most automated services simply ask you to enter your callback number at the beep. In some, very rare instances, you may get an actual human to whom you may provide a short message you would like sent to the pager.

Many alphanumeric pager providers also have an email gateway that let you send a short text message to [email protected].

Considering that nearly every new doctor in the US that enters training still receives a pager I hardly see it as "antiquated" and still rather mainstream. You should try walking into any hospital in the US to check if they're using antiquated technology such as a slide rule or pager.

And then for lots of fun I suggest trying to get cell reception near most radiology departments or in the basement departments..

We have a car remote start that, I believe, works off the pager network, an Audiovox Carlink.

Call a 1-800 number, put in my PIN, and can send a command to do various things, alarm, remote start, etc. Handy in the winter, when landing at airports, before leaving malls and theaters.

>If so why

Typically a one-way pager doesn't 'register' with a cell tower the way a cell phone does, i.e. it's just a receiver, not a transmitter - So when a page is sent the message basically says "Hey pager 12345 this is for you!" All the pagers receive the message, but only 12345 beeps.

Because of this, the pager transmitters can send a very strong signal - As a result, the pagers work almost everywhere.

As a result, they're still used by emergency services etc.

My friend has a computer consulting service and he still uses a pager. That way he can give the number out to his 'valued' customers. With his pager, they leave a message, so he can sit down, listen to their message, get his ducks in a row and then call them back.

Finally, he never has to remember to charge the thing. One AAA battery lasts quite a while.

Cheers,
Geoff Glave
Vancouver, Canada

>If so why

Typically a one-way pager doesn't 'register' with a cell tower the way a cell phone does, i.e. it's just a receiver, not a transmitter - So when a page is sent the message is transmitted simultaneously from all the towers in your coverage area. The message basically says "Hey pager 12345 this is for you!" All the pagers receive the message, but only 12345 beeps.

Because of this, the pager transmitters can send a very strong signal - As a result, the pagers work almost everywhere.

As a result, they're still used by emergency services etc., as they're typically VERY reliable. Much more so than a cell phone.

My friend has a computer consulting service and he still uses a pager. That way he can give the number out to his 'valued' customers. With his pager, they leave a message, so he can sit down, listen to their message, get his ducks in a row and then call them back.

Finally, he never has to remember to charge the thing. One AAA battery lasts quite a while.

Cheers,
Geoff Glave
Vancouver, Canada