As mobile phones became the world’s primary communications device, pagers, also known as beepers because they produced a sound to notify users of incoming messages, became largely obsolete, and demand for them declined substantially from the 1990s onwards.
But these small electronic devices remain a vital means of communications in some sectors – such as healthcare and emergency services – because of their durability and long battery life.
“It is the cheapest and most efficient way to reach a large number of people with messages that do not require a response,” said a senior surgeon at a leading British hospital, adding that pagers are commonly used by doctors and nurses in the country’s National Health Service (NHS).
“It is used to tell people where to go, when and what for.”
Pagers were thrust into the spotlight on Tuesday when thousands of pagers used by members of the Lebanese group Hezbollah exploded simultaneously across Lebanon, killing at least nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others.
According to a senior Lebanese security source and another source, the explosives inside these devices were planted by Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
According to the government, the U.K.’s N.H.S. was using about 130,000 pagers in 2019, more than one in 10 pagers worldwide. More recent figures were not available.
Doctors working in a hospital’s emergency department carry these with them whenever they are called.
A senior NHS doctor said that many pagers can sound a siren and broadcast a voice message to groups, so that the entire medical team can be informed about the emergency simultaneously. This is not possible with mobile phones.
Britain’s Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) uses pagers to alert its crews, a source familiar with the lifeboat service told Reuters. The RNLI declined to comment.
Burner Phones
Pagers can be more difficult to track than smartphones, as they lack modern navigation technology such as the Global Positioning System, or GPS.
This has made them a popular choice in the past among criminals, particularly drug dealers in the United States.
But former FBI agent Ken Gray told Reuters that gangs are increasingly using mobile phones these days.
“I don’t know if anybody uses them (pagers) or not,” he said.
“All those cell phones went to burner phones” that could easily be destroyed and replaced with other phones with different numbers, making them harder to trace.
Gray, who served 24 years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and now teaches criminal justice and homeland security at the University of New Haven, said criminals change with the times and new technology.
The global pager market, once a major source of revenue for companies such as Motorola, will reach $1.6 billion in 2023, according to an April report from Cognitive Market Research.
This is just a small portion of the global smartphone market, which is estimated to be worth nearly half a trillion US dollars by the end of 2023.
The report states that the demand for pagers is growing, as the need for efficient communication in the healthcare sector is increasing due to the growing number of patients. The report estimates a compound annual growth rate of 5.9% from 2023 to 2030.
It said North America and Europe are the two largest pager markets, generating revenues of $528 million and $496 million, respectively.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
