GadgetFreak

Just curious. If so why and what type service and service provider? Thanks.

Internaut

I think in the UK, the pager networks have now shut down. I had a one way text pager that I used if I was ever on call up until a couple of years back (we never had two way paging services of the sort that Blackberry originally used in the UK). I believe the last paging provider in the UK was an outfit called Mini Call.

Dodge DeBoulet

They're quite common in hospitals, where bans on cell phones in patient treatment areas still exist.

mattm199

Where I am they can send the page to my cellphone as a text message, so saves on carrying too much hardware!
Hospitals and similar usually have an in-house localised paging system (ie: aerial on the roof), with certain "long range" pagers previously subscribed to commercial providers. Such local systems might continue, but I imagine that the text messaging capabilities of phones will see the end of the commercial pager soon.

swise

I used to use one in my previous job. It's still used by my former coworkers.

We had an on call rotation and found that handing off the pager was the easiest, cheapest means to manage it. Each week one member of our team kept the pager. At the end of their on-call week they'd pass it to the next person.

We looked into having a phone number that would forward to our cell phones and several other options, but this was the least complicated method, and it seemed to work pretty well.

The trick was finding one of the old style pagers that wasn't enormous. All the pagers sold now are big to support a large display and text paging capabilities. We only needed numeric paging capabilities but only ever managed to find one numeric pager, which eventually developed a bad LCD.

dimramon

Some of my coworkers still use pagers. They also can't figure out whether their pagers work or not, which makes for really interesting situations when they are on call.

ScottC

I've still got an Iridium pager. It used to be fairly handy when cell signal was nonexistent, but that rarely happens.

jimquan

There has been a huge shift to mobile phones but to me they are just not 'mission critical.'

I'm a doc and I've seen tragedies occur because other docs gave up their pagers for mobile phones.

There was a recent Times article Registration may be required.

Jim

nyc123zoe55

Thanks for that article

gj83

When I worked in the hospital we had hospital pagers that worked for about a 5-10 mile radius and operated on an abbreviated paging system (never did figure out how to page from an outside line).

For the person oncall we rotated a pager with a statewide range.

With my new job, the tech support people wear a pager. They receive pages from our call center. I assume it has pretty fair range since most of our tech support live about 40 miles away.

Pagers are good because there is the expectation that you will be calling the person back so you have a few minutes to collect yourself and prepare. With a cell phone call you either answer then or let it go to voice mail with no real expectation of an immediate call back.

Nothing sucks more than waiting forever for a returned page though.

TLVorbust

Until 2 years ago I worked a place outiside of the city where commercial service was spotty at best. To keep communications open with key personell (It was a very large summer camp) we utilized both two way radios, and for other people who just needed to be called to a telephone we actually just set up our own internal pager system. It was pretty cool and actually saved us money. (I thought it was cool, people who had to carry around the darn pagers wanted to kill me for setting it up.)

empedocles

As indicated above, pagers still exist in medicine and tech support.

I'm currently doing a little consulting work for a medical center, and in the meetings I attend all of the lower-level medical directors (RN's) carry pagers. Don't know if they work outside the campus, though.

Worked for a state agency a couple years ago and their "key" IT people had pagers linked to their mainframe. In addition to the normal person-initiated paging, the mainframe had some monitoring software that could page them if it detected a problem.

Fire and police departments ues 'em, too. Especially volunteer FD's.

UAVirgin

Skytel is still alive and well providing 1way/2way paging and vehicle tracking.

Many, many moons ago I was a skytel 2way beta tester. That was bleeding edge. I even beta tested and then used their little device that hooked into a HP 100LX palmtop.

bdesmond

I carried one until late last year - the damn thing worked practically everywhere, especially places my cell didn't. Lots of folks at that job still have them too.

Xyzzy

I saw a TV show a couple of months ago on pagers. They showed one store in NYC that still sells/fixes them. The big problem is that the hardware is hard to obtain new. It's not made any more, so the shop they showed fixes old pagers and resells them.