A page in communications history — January 2005

It goes without saying that the global market for paging has declined as the market for mobile phones and two-way messaging devices has increased. However that does not reflect the whole story and, contrary to received wisdom, there exists a highly effective and stable market for paging services.

But let us take a brief look at the history of paging and the reasons for its fall in public consciousness. Belt-slung pagers were once the communications product of choice for a wide spectrum of users from doctors, engineers and staff on-call to businessmen needing day-to-day information and even teenagers being told to come home.

Using VHF frequencies and based on narrow band broadcast technology, paging is based on a worldwide standard from 1984, and with little to go wrong has consistently paid its way. Pagers were never subject to the WAP or MMS phenomena of being a technology before its time or a solution looking for a problem. Paging did what it said on the box, delivered one way alphanumeric messages with an extremely high degree of coverage and probability that the message would arrive.

However the consumer market changed. Mobile phones presented a glamorous alternative, a lifestyle step change that proved so seductive it swept all before it. In one beautifully presented small device the consumer got two-way voice and text messaging plus a host of add-ons and services which suddenly made the faithful pager a little pedestrian and certainly not something you would get out in front of your friends. But the consumer also got a big bill at the end of the month, which for a lifestyle accessory was acceptable but for business presented a problem.

To bring this up to date, the paging market did show steady decline in the face of the consumer's love affair with mobile phones, but much to the surprise of the paging companies that remained in the market, it plateaued much earlier than forecast and in fact showed a slight increase as the market stabilised.

That is the current situation, but where is this army of pager users, because they are not as obvious as they used to be?

The answer lies in the fundamentals of the technology: pagers are simple, use little energy and need very few transmitters; the technology is low cost and reliable; receive one message or receive a million, the cost is the same. What's more, coverage far exceeds that of mobile technology and most importantly, if your application involves receiving alphanumeric content that is critical to the task, there is no better way than paging.

In fact we are subject to paging technologies every day, but are seldom aware of it. Modern bus stops with LCD displays showing routes and times before each bus are based on paging. Modern train timetables use paging as does the streaming technology showing stock prices or sports scores. Whilst these are the more obvious examples, there exists a huge market in both commercial and public sector projects. Any application that responds to a trigger to pump out critical information is generally a paging application. Hospitals use pagers to contact medical staff; the railway network uses pagers to inform engineering, maintenance and management about the movement of trains; water authorities use automatic measuring and trigger mechanisms to alert personnel to the changes in river and reservoir levels. Moving away from public infrastructure projects, we find paging used in food storage and retail to alert staff of temperature changes in freezing and chilling boxes, and business continuity and disaster recovery companies rely on paging as the alternative to easily destroyed mobile networks.

It is interesting to note in the New York 9/11 catastrophe that, whilst the mobile networks were partially destroyed in the immediate area and the rest of the networks quickly became congested, the paging networks which work on satellite technology provided a much needed fallback service to thousands of individuals and businesses.

The list of users and applications is huge, but as paging has been re-discovered by a new generation of business seeking to lower costs and improve service, so the paging infrastructure has been modernised to meet these needs.