Why emergency crews still carry pagers in the smartphone age
A commercial paging transmitter typically radiates about 1,000 watts, while a mobile phone tower puts out roughly 0.6 watts per channel. Each paging mast therefore blankets a far wider area, and a one-way pager listens without having to answer. When the 2005 London bombings overloaded emergency radio networks, those old-fashioned traits suddenly looked like an advantage.
The idea began with doctors. Al Gross patented the first telephone pager system in 1949 and met resistance from physicians unhappy about being permanently on call. A New York service launched in 1950 charged them $12 a month for a 200-gram receiver that worked within 40 kilometres of a single tower. In 1960 Motorola's John Francis Mitchell combined walkie-talkie and car radio technology into the first transistorised pager.
Bell's Bellboy, shown at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, was the first commercial personal paging service and one of the earliest consumer uses of the transistor. Each unit held three reed relays, each tuned to one of 33 frequencies, and it buzzed only when all three were triggered together. The owner then found a telephone and rang the service centre to hear the message.
Pagers peaked when they were cheaper, smaller and more dependable than early mobiles, and Japan had more than ten million in use in 1996. Then cheap handsets and text messaging took over. US paging revenue fell from $6.2 billion in 2003 to $2.1 billion in 2008, Motorola stopped making new units in 2001, and Japan's last provider switched off on 1 October 2019, with Russia's following in November 2021. In 2017 Britain's National Health Service was thought to use more than a tenth of the world's remaining pagers, some 130,000, at a yearly cost of 6.6 million pounds.
Their weakness is the flip side of their strength. With no transmitter, a one-way pager cannot confirm delivery, so a message sent while it is off simply vanishes unnoticed. Even so, volunteer firefighters and rural first responders still wear them, restaurants hand them to waiting diners, and since 1991 British and Irish birdwatchers have received rare-bird alerts on them.
Source: Pager
