Are pagers old-fashioned? Are you kidding?

Okay, so you might be in the majority who think that pagers aren’t cool, but here’s hoping I change that – or at least get you thinking about pagers again.

Stereotyped nowadays for only being used by birdwatchers, coastguards and medics, the trusty pager, believe it or not, is still deemed a vital bit of kit! The beeping business that seems ancient in the age of smartphones, I’ve found, is still very much treasured in certain parts of the world, by certain organisations and by certain groups of people.

Admittedly, the facts and figures do show that fewer people are using pagers, but that’s not to say that people don’t want them! Is it the way they look, is it the technology, or is it that they are just deemed useless?

Most traditional pagers certainly look dated in today’s comms gadget landscape. I don’t think there would be any tech-savvy person in this world who would be proud to show off their 80’s belt clipped pager. Having said that, paging people are practical people and want a device that can do a job and do it well. If it hasn’t got an edge to edge display or OLED screen, well frankly, that doesn’t matter.

Some beep, some speak and some give you text messages – hardly big selling points. Put simply, the only real advantage of traditional pagers is their reputation for having slightly better reliability. Where mobile phone networks are patchy, the alternative separate paging network does offer a modest improvement, but with more and more paging services suppliers dwindling into nonexistence, it raises the question as to whether paging networks are sustainable.

With the expense of ground infrastructure, limitations of reach and lack of secure communications being the main causes of the decline in pager popularity, are satellite networks the answer to bring the pager into the 21st century?

Although satellite paging has been achieved in the past, the software and reception limitations and hardware capabilities have severely constrained the feasible range of applications, until now. The new Iridium Burst ™ service (which is fully supported in the new Iridium NEXT constellation) has enabled GDB to deliver a truly global satellite paging solution, that abolishes the issues found with traditional pagers. We’re making pagers cool again.
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How does satellite pager compare to traditional wide area paging? Have a look at the table...

​So, does the introduction of this new satellite pager to the market make the pager cool again? - Maybe not to the 80’s pager consumer market, but it’s definitely a cool gadget for certain groups of people (not just us GDB lot).

Trevor Drawbridge

Director, Global Data Burst Ltd.