WHO HERE GOT FRIENDTER?

skeujin

4 Sep 08, 18:16

Originally posted by Daisuke-kun:

wow. shocking!

Pager use in the 21st century

A Skyper pager that is in use for ham radio

A pager that is in use for emergency services

A mid '90s opaque black Avont pager model

Pagers are still in use today in places where mobile phones typically cannot reach users, and also in places where the operation of the radio transmitters contained in mobile phones is problematic or prohibited. One such type of location is a large hospital complex, where cellular coverage is often weak or nonexistent, where radio transmitters are suggested to interfere with sensitive medical equipment and where there is a greater need of assurance for a timely delivery of a message.

Some common environments in which pagers are still used are:

Pagers remain in use to notify emergency personnel. For example, they are required to be used by UK lifeboat men and retained firefighters.

Pagers are mostly carried by staff in medical establishments, allowing them to be summoned to emergencies.

Pagers are also widely used in the IT world, especially in cases where on-call technicians cannot rely on more modern cellular telephone systems. A good example would be in a cellular telephone company, where a service interruption in the cellular network would also mean that it would not be possible to notify a technician due to the outage in the network. Therefore, in these companies, engineers are usually equipped with a pager that uses another telco's mobile network to ensure reachability in case of emergency. Pagers are also frequently used by non-telco IT departments.

Hearing impaired people who have no use for mobile voice services sometimes use two-way pagers.

Additionally, some irrigation control systems and traffic signals are now controlled by messages sent via paging networks. Due to energy concerns in the United States and other countries, 2Way paging networks are being used for power company meter reading and control.

Another pager technology in wide use today is the call or tone pager. Mainly used in the hospitality industry, customers are given a theft-protected portable receiver which usually vibrates, flashes or beeps when a table becomes free, or when their meal is ready.

-wikipedia