Who uses pagers anymore?

(Reuters) – As mobile phones have become more mainstream as a means of communication, pagers (also known as beepers because of the sound they make to notify users of incoming messages) have become largely obsolete, with demand for them falling from their peak popularity in the 1990s.

However, these small electronic devices remain an essential means of communication in some areas, such as healthcare and emergency services, thanks to their durability and long battery life.

“It’s the cheapest and most effective way of communicating with a large number of people through messages that don’t require a response,” said a senior surgeon at a major UK hospital, adding that pagers are widely used by doctors and nurses across the country’s National Health Service (NHS).

“It serves to inform people where, when and why to go.”

Pagers made headlines on Tuesday when thousands of pagers used by members of the militant group Hezbollah were simultaneously detonated across Lebanon, killing at least nine people and wounding nearly 3,000.

According to a senior Lebanese security source and another source, the explosives were planted in the bombs by the Israeli spy agency Mossad.

The NHS used about 130,000 pagers in 2019, according to the government, which was more than one in 10 pagers worldwide. More recent data is not available.

Doctors working in hospital emergency departments carry them with them when they are on duty.

Many pagers can also send out a siren and then broadcast a voice message to groups so that entire medical teams are alerted to an emergency at once, a senior NHS doctor said. This is not possible with a mobile phone.

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.

PAGERS MORE DIFFICULT TO TRACK

Hezbollah fighters use pagers as a low-tech means of communication to avoid Israeli tracking, two sources familiar with the group told Reuters this year.

Pagers can be harder to track than smartphones because they receive messages sent over a radio signal, whereas cellphones send information to the network to find the nearest cell phone tower and maintain a connection, making them easier to track.

Pagers also do not support more modern navigation technologies such as the Global Positioning System, or GPS.

For this reason, they have historically been a popular choice among criminals, especially drug dealers in the United States.

But gangs are increasingly using cellphones, former FBI agent Ken Gray told Reuters.

“I don’t know if anyone uses them (pagers),” he said.

“Everyone has moved to mobile phones, disposable phones,” which can be easily thrown away and replaced with another phone with a different number, making them difficult to track.

Gray, who worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 24 years and now teaches criminal law and homeland security at the University of New Haven, said criminals change with the times and technology.

The global pager market, once a major source of revenue for companies like Motorola, was expected to reach $1.6 billion in 2023, according to an April report by Cognitive Market Research.

This is a small fraction of the global smartphone market, which was estimated to be worth around half a trillion dollars by the end of 2023.

However, the report says demand for pagers is growing as more patients increase the need for effective communication in the healthcare sector, with a compound annual growth rate of 5.9% between 2023 and 2030.

The company said North America and Europe are the two largest pager markets, generating $528 million and $496 million in revenue, respectively.

(Reporting by Michael Collett-White and Josephine Mason in London, Miyoung Kim in Singapore and Rich McKay in Atlanta; Additional reporting by Yadarisa Shabong and Chandini Monnappa in Bengaluru; Editing by Catherine Evans and Michael Perry)