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Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Have a Pager? Do You Find It Useful?
New submitter Chance Callahan writes: I am starting a business, helping a friend with his own startup, and volunteering regularly with a major political campaign (#feelthebern). One thing I have noticed is that my phone likes to die at the most inconvenient times and leaves me out of touch with people. With the business I'm starting requiring clients to be able to get ahold me quickly, I have been seriously considering getting a two-way pager. It's much easier swap out a AA battery once a month then to worry "will client X be able to get ahold me in the event of an emergency?" So, Slashdot, the million dollar question is, in the age of cell phones, do you have a pager? Do you still find it useful? Do any other "dead-tech" tools still play a big role for your communications? For example, fax machines are still big in Japan, and a lot of people keep landlines, too.
Why not buy one of those easy-to-find extra battery USB-charger things and carry that with you instead?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Where I work in downtown Seattle, cell coverage doesn't work at all below ground or in our office building if you're not near a window. We have to still use pagers.
There are phones with big batteries, even with swappable batteries, which won't leave you in the lurch. For that matter, you can carry a battery the size of a fat cigarette pack which will quickly recharge your pretty-fone.
"Do You Still Have a Pager? Do You Find It Useful?"
"No", and "hell no".
Why not just carry a phone? I really don't see what advantage a pager has over a phone these days, to be honest.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Get a more reliable cell phone (either a simple feature-phone or iPhone), a car and extra desk chargers. You should only need those extra chargers if you're like me and you forget to charge your phone 2-3 days in a row or you're actually continuously (10h+) dialed in on the phone. There is also a low power mode on iOS which can be manually turned on and disables all non-essential features.
Not sure how you manage to have a phone with less than a half day of life. Paying for a pager and having your customers learn how to use it is ludicrous, even if it's a voicemail, most people will refuse to 'talk to a machine' regardless.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Battery Cases, Expansion Battery packs, Modified flux capacitors, Arc reactors, Cold fusion... so many ways to charge?!? You could even rig a charger off a potato if you really wanted to. Anything is better than a pager.
I've got a landline, but basically only because my work requires that I have real phone service. I don't keep a cell phone either as in my situation it'd be a waste 99% of the time, or more.
One thing I have noticed is that my phone likes to die at the most inconvenient times and leaves me out of touch with people. With the business I'm starting requiring clients to be able to get ahold me quickly, I have been seriously considering getting a two-way pager.
If your phone is dead, how are you planning on getting in touch with your clients quickly? Are you really going to have a conversation via two-way pager?
I've worked in an on-call position for ~5 years and always carried a cell phone.
Buy USB power bank/charger for ~$30, don't waste money on a pager + service.
I mean, I haven't even heard of firefighters or doctors around here using pagers since sometime around the early 00s. Didn't even know they were still a thing.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
One that only needs a charge a week. Apparently you're the kind of person who can neither configure a smart phone to get through a day with a single charge, nor remember to carry a charged USB power bank, so get a feature phone. You know what's going to happen if you rely on a pager, don't you? Nobody will know how to contact you on that.
If you cannot remember to charge a phone every other day, how in the hell are you going to run a business?
I am part of a couple of groups that use SMS (sent from an email list server) for notifications. ...
Sometimes it works great, sometimes they are delayed 30min, 1hr,
Its amazing the phone companies can charge so much and offer so little.
like plug it in your car when you drive? or keep it plugged in all day at work? or do you have some OCD issues like my wife against charging devices as you work and waiting for them to die?
Most of the systems used older analog towers and even the 'digital' ones don't have much of a network anymore. Buy a better phone, that would be a cheaper solution overall.
My company still passes around a pager even though we all have cell phones. The reasoning is that the pager will reach areas that don't have good cellular coverage. I don't like carrying the extra item around, but I do find that without it I would miss most text messages or emails on my phone since the pager is much louder.
Uncrippled would be something with a swappable battery.
You can get cheap dumb phones with long battery life, or you can even get one with AA batteries (like SpareOne). That will give you both voice and text functionality and spare you the embarrassment of asking someone to page you (at least I would feel awkward mentioning pagers to my clients).
Also, you could setup a simple email to SMS gateway, so you can get a text message whenever somebody emails emergency@yourbusiness.com.
In a nutshell, your phone battery will drain quickly only if you keep using it as a smart phone, i.e. using data, wifi, bluetooth, having your screen on all the time, etc. If you keep a dedicated mobile phone for emergencies only and use it primarily for texting, you will have all the benefits of a pager while remaining in the 21st century.
You can push a dumb phone battery to a full week if you do it right, and to me at least, charging a phone over weekend or in the car is easier and cheaper then swapping batteries.
Once you become used to how much more reliable and faster they are than text messages, you'll never want to go back. In most downtown areas there are big spaces where buildings block the signal so they're just not dependable. Also, high SMS traffic in urban areas means it can take hours for messages to get through. Yesterday, messages were lagging over four hours with AT&T in downtown Seattle.
Since most wireless has gone to cell phone, pager coverage has become problematic. I used to have my home phone posted on the white board in the OCC, with a "if I don't respond to a page, call me", which is something I don't recommend (giving out your home phone). Therefore, my business bought me a cell phone to cover in place of the pager, and it's had the added advantage of being able to call back, along with use as a laptop wireless connection.
I used to have one but the network has been dismantled as far as I know. In Ireland pagers never had decent 2-way functionality and they were never popular to begin with.
I'm on call from time to time (one week a month, for a full 7 days) and I *LOVE* the fact that a Pager at 3AM at least gives me a bit of time to wake-up and go to the toilet compared to being called directly and dump on a phone bridge with 10 other people wanting an answer *RIGHT NOW*.
I also have shitty Cell reception where I live, but Pager reception is A-1
I have a pager. Nagios pages us when there are system issues. It also emails us, but if our internal network goes down chances are the POTS phone will keep working.
Having said that, my boss and I are always looking for ways to ditch the pager... They're expensive, and annoying to get (and I already smashed one by accident).
we dropped them at work and went to text, for one main reason. if you are out of the pagers area, or battery dies, or accidentally have it off, it will not queue up the page. A page is sent once, whether it makes it to the pager or not. whereas a phone will catch up as soon as it has a signal
Many emergency services such as fire departments, Offices of emergency management, etc still use RF pagers. The system is part of or tied in with the dispatch system. By removing third parties in the communication signal chain, the pager systems provide latency free, and high availability for dispatch systems. They also work well for emergency services because they are geographically limited by the pager transmission antenna coverage. which usually coincides with the emergency services coverage area. For the OP's situation there are usually two options: a local RF network, or satellite pager systems. The local networks may or may not have better coverage, just depends on your local pager provider. Sat pagers tend to have nationwide coverage, but reception is limited by access to the sky. Those choices may or may not be suitable for your needs. RB
I also still use paperback books. They have size and map advantages over ebooks (The guy that invents software to let you zoom to your heart's content on a map included in an ebook will make a $1,000,000)
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Invest in a portable charger and pay once versus a monthly fee for a pager.
Bada bing, bada boom.
Pagers tend to have better reception than cell phones, at least fairly recently when I last looked this up for my own curiosity. Also, many paging companies have "TAP" servers that you can dial into with a modem to send pages. This is could make a nice last-resort fallback for when a data center has lost network access and you can still provide outbound alerting via a backup landline.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Since you didn't complain about poor signal strength, I'll focus solely on the issue of running out of power. When I had a phone with replaceable batteries, I carried two extra batteries that were always fully charged. Even with opportunistic charging habits, I would regularly swap out to a fresh battery in the early/mid afternoon. For the few times a month I went through both extra batteries, I had a 20k mAhr external battery pack I would fall back on. With this setup, I never ran out of power. I have the RAVPower battery pack and have been immensely satisfied with my purchase. I've also have heard very good things on the Anker line. I used this setup for over two years successfully. For the past 3 months, I'm using a current gen smartphone without an interchangeable battery (or SD slot! life sucks). I've been relying on a mophie battery case and the battery pack to get me through the day. Honestly, I haven't had to use the battery pack as the energy drain during the day is significantly less and the mophie has been sufficient to keep me charged up.
I still carry a pager! I still have to carry a pager, partly because of having multiple institutional/corporate partners that like to have a leash on their "V.P." - it always makes people laugh when they see it come out in board meetings. The reason for carrying it is really two-fold 1) it will wake the dead when it goes off and 2) living in NYC and taking public transportation does not merit 100% cell phone coverage. The pager frequencies are so low that they have been able to reach me in the bowels of the MTA.
They are pricey, a good rechargeable Apollo model goes for $200-300 and nationwide service is nearly double that!
It really depends on why it is needed? For me it is the necessity and immediacy, I have a few hundred servers spread across 50+ data centers and 6 continents; when something is an emergency I need to know.
Another advantage of a pager is that they run on a different network, and in case of an emergency when all the cellular networks are down or blocked, your pager will probably still be working.
This could especially be important if you provide some kind of urgent service
I work for a defense contractor, and 1-way pagers are common place. Not only are they far more reliable, but you can't take any device that transmits into a secure area.
Maybe consider getting a flip phone.
I still use one as my business line and only have to charge it once a week with moderate use.
They're rather cheap.
I don't know the solution to OP's problem, although I had a flip phone for a while a couple years ago and it had amazing battery life...I think I charged it twice a week max, overnight.
Also, if I was volunteering for a political campaign I'd be using a different phone and number entirely. In my volunteer work I use the $13/mo. plan from Page Plus for this purpose and it's just fine.
As far as dead tech goes, I write in shorthand, definitely dead tech at this point. I do it because I enjoy writing by hand and shorthand saves me lots of time. I write at least 2-3x faster and I can still read what I wrote afterward. Plus nobody can look over and read my personal notes when I'm at a conference, that sort of thing.
Nothing like getting a page with a phone number to...
I seriously would not do business with any company who had as a point of contact, a pager number. In the age of smart phones (with battery packs and alternative charging methods) why go backwards, in a worst case have an older cellphone that lasts days.
One of my friends carries a pager when he's on call for work (a municipality, and he'd most likely be contacted about a toxic spill). He just clips it to his belt and forgets about it.
The pager has several advantages over a phone. The most critical is that it's a shared device that gets passed between the on-call staff. That means there's no risk of someone forgetting their phone at home, running out of battery or having an incorrect number listed on the staff contact form. Emergency Services has a single contact number that should always work.
A simple 27MHz Citizen's Band hand-held transceiver. There are still truckers using that band, and when you leave the big city there are hicks airing their dirty laundry and gossiping. It's hilarious. Sometimes I break in and shout "you're all faggots!" and listen for the fun!
PS: I'm in Québec, so I really yell "vous etes tous des osties de tappettes!".
I know people who carry old fashioned pagers, and have done so for years. Yes, they also have smart phones, but cell service in many places is shit, and pagers have been part of the support infrastructure forever.
And, believe it or not, people still use land lines too. I know it's shocking to the kiddies, but it's true.
Do you people all think this technology became obsolete because you can get a freakin' app?
Where I live your chance of cellular coverage is iffy, and I'm in the burbs, just in a spot with bad coverage.
My wife's stupid fucking pager? Still keeps working.
What you have to ask yourself, is do you want to get paged in the middle of the night, and just how much do you plan on charging for that privilege? Everyone I know who carries one is getting a premium just to have it, and an hourly rate in the event it goes off.
Otherwise, carrying one is the stupidest idea you can imagine, and people just assume you work 24x7. If you do that, well, you're a sucker.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I stopped using mine in the '90s when the service provider went under.
We still have pagers for all of our on-call staff. The cost/coverage used to be really good, even better than cellular, now however not so much, so I expect we'll be phasing them out in favor of simple email alerts to existing cell phones.
We still also use fax machines, to communicate with our vendors and certain international customers who insist on having documents faxed to them. I never understood why, clearly an emailed PDF is superior to a fax machine, but meh, I don't make the decisions.
It isn't randomly dying. The battery is going dead because you're too stupid to keep it charged. Stop failing it and it will stop failing you.
From my observations of Flex and POCSAG protocols with homebrew receivers, it appears that Hospitals, Emergency services, Veternarians, and a few traditional phone# users are using these things. The signals are incredibly good and can be received almost anywhere... even from other states sometimes. They still have some applications.
Oh! DeLorean is paging me. brb.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Let your client s know the only way to reach you is either text message (SMS) or email (SMTP/IMAP) direct to your smartphone. Turn off the telephone ringer. In business nothing rises to the level of "OMG! Life or death!"
If your phone "likes to die", have you considered just getting a new phone that isn't broken, or carrying a spare battery if it's dieing because you're draining the battery?
Client calls come into a pbx, ring the cell and desk phone etc etc etc. Mind you my desk phone is an android tablet with poe and a real handset/speaker phone so things like contacts just work and bluetooth.
Second get a phone thats does not suck, working with a nexus 5x and better battery life fast charging for that every 36 hours or so. I do miss my qi charging still.
No sir I dont like it.
So what do you do when the pager goes off.
Do you run and find a pay phone?
Do you reach into your pocket for your cell phone?
What do you plan to do when the customer captures your cell phone number
and just calls you back?
A pager does have value because the coverage was nearly universal.
They are reliable.
A classic pager just displays numbers to call back or pre-shared code numbers.
The day I got a text/message pager that could give me a message "All OK" in contrast
to a call back number that was run to find a phone leash was like being released from
chains. It still took years to retrain managers and customers to send status hints in
contrast to a summons in the dark.
Mostly get a modern phone with a lot of battery life.
Car chargers are important to have.
Get a spare battery strategy.
Coverage... all cell coverage is not equal. Cell coverage has gaps that pager service does not.
One AC was right... pagers do not transmit so might be allowed inside when smartphones are not.
Camera... most repair folk now photograph the device serial number, make and model.
Some places prohibit cameras...
Political campaigns have gotten very automated and a smart phone will allow the party
to help you do what they want. The political tools allow a canvasser to know the registration
and names of folk behind the door at any address even geolocation with GPS. Vans driving
voters to the ballot places are able to pass over individuals registered for the 'other' party.
Make a list of the details and go shopping.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
extra battery USB-charger things
Yup, I would definitely agree with this.
My setup up is:
- 10'000mAh USB powerbank (good for ~4x full recharge of the smartphone)
- small compact USB wallwart that can still deliver at least 1'000mA (2'100mA model in the same build size are starting to appear).
- USB roll-up cable (take very little place and doesn't tangle)
With that I'm good to go every-where for long period of time. I can recharge the smartphone on the go with the powerbank.
Or plug it into the wall, or even into the electrical outlets available in most european trains to recharge the battery.
That has really helped me once I've switched from old dumbphone (holds charge 1 week at least) to modern smartphone (is very heavy on cloud usage, charge holds 1 day under heavy 3G usage)
Equipment is still compact and doesn't eat up too much place in pockets/bag/backpack.
Note that lithium batteries are a delicate technology.
It's better to either go to a well known brand, or at least buy from a well known shop so it's easy to have warranty in case of defect.
They might all be produced in china, but at least you can reach someone who is liable for the build quality.
Avoid buying lithium batteries from shady seller on ebay (or taobao, etc.) who promise you 30'000mAh for 20$ (might explode !)
NOTE:
Of course, it helps to live on a continent where the standard power connector is compact and easily interoperable (and are all 100-240V range by default).
Bad luck for you if you live in the UK and its humongous power connector.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You can have a single contact phone number that forwards to the persons on call cell phone based on the time of day, day of the week, or whenever you switch shifts.
I seriously would not do business with any company who had as a point of contact, a pager number. In the age of smart phones (with battery packs and alternative charging methods) why go backwards, in a worst case have an older cellphone that lasts days.
Yeah, just because the pager is far more reliable, phooey on that old stuff...
Delete it, or if not an option (like on my HTC phone) disable it. It's only been 4 days into my experiment, but I've charged my phone once in that time (HTC Desire 601, nothing too fancy, but decent.) For the last six months I've had to charge twice a day....and I honestly barely use the thing (the phone, and almost never the FB app). A few days ago read an article (Guardian I think) where people found the Facebook app was hosing their battery. Disabled it, got well over 50hrs before my next charge, and since my last charge it's been nearly 24hrs again (and 73% battery left.)
If you need to access Facebook, load m.facebook.com into the Chrome browser, and allow notifications. Works almost as good. (Better in some ways, you can reply to messages without having the FB Messenger app as well.) I think I read there's a skin or something that makes it even smoother. I'll see how it lasts after a couple weeks, but it's been a while since I've been able to get more than 24hrs without a charge....and now it's several days in a row, so pretty promising. Couldn't figure out what was causing my battery to drain. I shudder to think how much energy is wasted on all the phones with this app..what are they doing, mining for bitcoins in the app?!
I used to carry a pager not too long ago. But in recent years nobody bothered to "call me" on the pager. I think reason is many people don't know what or how it is used. i.e. call my pager number, after hearing a few beeps then key in phone number you want me to call and then I will call you. Is this procedure still taught? Only need a few sentences at most for instructions. But maybe pagers gone way of dial telephones, plop one in front of somebody under 40 and they will have no idea what they are looking at.
It seemed AAAbatterY didn't last very one, since it rarely received calls many times I forget to wear it. When I find after some time, battery is not only dead but leaked. So I have clean out the battery holder, kept doing this several times eventually didn't put a battery into it. Meanwhile the gal came through the office doing property inventory asked if I still use the pager. I had to find it in my junque archive, I turned it in. Last week got the message item has been disposed.
mfwright@batnet.com
Have your typist fax your pager number to my secretary who will send it to me via telegram.
I'm at a medical center where pagers are still in use. Why? Pagers work in the basements and don't drop signal when you're inside a large building away from a window. We can request an upgraded 2-way pager, but most at best a pager will alert you and you can either pick up a phone or move to location where your phone has a signal. Under trial are VOIP phones that use our local Wi-Fi for staff on the floor to have texting & voice. During a prolong blackout, paging continued to work long after cell coverage had died.
"One thing I have noticed is that my phone likes to die at the most inconvenient times and leaves me out of touch with people."
This is caused by buying the wrong phone that has crap life, or the user not understanding you have to put the phone on the charger every night.
I am a HEAVY phone user and even my One Plus X, one of the worst battery life phones out there still has 10% at the end of the day. I really dont feel bat at all when someone's phone is dying because it's because they were lazy and did not charge it the night before, or did not bother to charge it when in the car, yes even 5 minutes on a full rate charger makes a huge difference.
So unless you wander around in the wilderness all day long, there is never an excuse to not plug in the phone.
The other problem is silly people still using that 4 year old phone that has no battery life left... Wah, stop being cheap and buy a new phone.
Where I live, the pager systemwas shut down ten years ago. Nobody used them, nobody miss them. A cheap non.smart phone lasts for a week on moderate use.
Yes, I carry a pager and wouldn't consider getting rid of it. For what it is designed to do, a cell phone doesn't hold a candle to it. I suppose if you never leave the surface of a big city, a cell phone might be suitable but my pager however, works everywhere. In the city, underground in the parking garages, in the data center, in the middle of the country away from the city. Cell phones are great, I love my iPhone, but I know with absolute certainty, that if someone needs to get a hold of me, they will be able to beep me on my pager no matter where I am. Not so on a cell.
I'm maybe 25% of the way down the page and already I've seen three posts from you about "wireless ethernet". Since you feel the need to keep posting that in reply to every message , I'll let you know: wireless Ethernet does not exist. No such thing. Unless it's installed in a Ford Chevy, by a man woman, during winter summer.
Perhaps the reason the people who make the standards have an opinion different from yours is because they have some clue what they're talking about.
I've carried a pager for over 25 years (systems programmer, then systems admin(VMS, Linux, SAN...)). I like the pager for several reasons: 1) after so many years it is guaranteed to wake me up (and more importantly, it doesn't wake up my wife). 2) it will respond in places that my phone won't reliably get a signal. 3) battery life. 4) clips to my belt and forget it's there.5) if I go on vacation, I can leave it behind. Most paging systems will pass email notifications to the pager; at this point most of my pages are one system or another crying for daddy to help.
Pagers were never that great here around, only hospitals used it, and about two years ago, I was within a project to lay to rest the last pager system at a hospital I know of. The other hospitals use DECT phones since ages and have the whole campus covered with DECT repeaters. Pagers are clumsy as you have to find the next phone and call from there. DECT phones can be called directly.
And sails are far more reliable than diesel engines; clearly modern international shipping is just a fad following what's new and shiny.
It's called weighing the benefits. The benefits of a modern smart phone far outweigh the limited benefit of a reliable pager for the vast majority of scenarios.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
You can have a single contact phone number that forwards to the persons on call cell phone based on the time of day, day of the week, or whenever you switch shifts.
And that's why you don't work in emergency services. Reliability Engineering is a thing, and every additional link in the chain adds additional failure points.
I like Google Voice, and Skype forwarding, and VOIP conference switches, and all that too... But a physical hand-off is much more reliable.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
American Messaging bought Skytel a few years ago.
January 1, 2013 they shut down the old Skytel transmitters in the US.
Pager worked great in my office, but no longer worked at home.
As for SMS gateways... We added a european office in addition to the US and Indian offices to the on call rotation. The European pages would arrive hours after they were sent.
Our solution, we sent the European office a US mobile configured for international roaming.
If your phone is dead, how are you going to respond to the page anyway?
I have been seriously considering getting a two-way pager.
Does that help with your confusion?
I'm cool with it. It is simple. All kinds of stuff goes wrong with my cell phone all of the time, but the pager is rock solid.
Have carried a pager for 25 years. Messages are sent to the pager and my cellphone. Have yet to not receive a message on the pager. Cellphone messages always lag the pager message. Technically why the pager is better is because the noise floor for a radio receiver is dependant on bandwidth(Hz) times temperature(K). Pager has a narrow bandwidth and cellphone wide. Have not worked it out but noise floor for a cell will not be much below -100dBm and pager is below -120dBm. This means the pager is 100 times more sensitive to rf power than the cell. The low frequency of the pager seems to get better penetration into buildings etc. The low baud rate of the pager makes reception more reliable. Carrying 2 devices is inconvenient but the pager is far more reliable than the cellphone.
Hate to admit it but, yep... I carry an alpha pager with me as well as a phone. Why? Because pagers have a much better coverage area, and are generally more reliable. It is used not only for emergency alerts (system down, etc) but also inside the huge building by people to alert to call them (they don't supply cell phones, nor do I want a "work" cell phone, nor do I want my users having MY phone number).
I hope to rid myself of it one day... cell coverage has improved so much over the years. If I could find a way to SIMULATE a pager with a separate phone number, I might could try right now....
Each night I take it off and put it next to my VCR and lava lamp so I know where it is in the morning.
The radio networks to support the pagers are shrinking. I had one for my job, because I needed to be on call after work hours. It worked great, it did one job and did it damn well.
The problem was the coverage area started to shrink. The paging company could no longer afford to pay for the tower leases to maintain their network, so we started losing coverage in rural areas. Now I have a damned iPhone to maintain, charge, etc. Ugh!
I HIGHLY recommend at least trying a pager if you are going to spend your time in an urban area! Outside that, coverage may be iffy. I miss mine terribly...
Some years ago, us sysadmins went from pagers to cell phones, with the alert system sending SMS via email, which is very close in function than what we used to get from pagers. I typically set the phone to some loud and obnoxious sound for a text, something that will wake me up. People who know me, know the very specific noise it makes.
One critical disadvantage we noticed right away is that cell phones don't last very long on a full charge. Even in the days before smartphones that last less than a day on a full charge, cell phones did not have the longevity of pagers, which could go a whole week or more on one battery.
Soon the practice was for the on-call person to carry about his or her person a cell phone and a spare battery. It was common to see an admin with the large bulge in their cargo pant thigh pocket for the cell phone and a slightly smaller bulge in other thigh pocket for the spare battery.
When cell phones with non-replaceable batteries started appearing, we got special dispensation to keep using a model with a replaceable battery. Now with external batteries being available, I don't know if this is still critical or just a convenience, but personally I prefer to swap out the battery rather than have a weight dangling off the phone.
If you decide to go with a pager, you should probably check on pager range, as it might have changed since the old days, as fewer people are using them. Whereas, I believe (but am not positive) that SMS works while roaming.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Back in the days when you bought a phone, battery lasted until new model came out. Like this one: nokia 1100: http://i1.wp.com/pictures.joko...
...an insane long standby time.
When I full charge that thing, it can take a call or text for like two weeks. Maybe using that mode is worth a thought. It's still useful for web browsing, e-mail, text, etc...
(And yes, I tested that on a long trip, no charger. Got 10 days, no problem, took a few calls, answered a few e-mails, various SMS.
Blogging because I can...
As somebody who works in technical support for a large vendor - your customer's definition of an "emergency", my sales team definition of an "emergency", and my technical definition of an "emergency" all vary significantly. Make sure you set guidelines and expectations before you offer up this service. Kudos for going above and beyond starting out but be careful where this becomes the expectation to be available 24x7 rather than the exception.
On the technical level - if you are in locations frequently where you don't have cell service - pager. If you are in cell coverage 95%+ of the time, get USB battery packs.
This story is the opportunity to ask: how can a pager be integrated with IT systems? Are there standards to send a message? Is there an associated fee?
Join team Trump lots of less work convincing people to be a communist. Seriously!
Flagship phones use a lot of battery, in the interest of making the most powerful, cool devices out there.
Second-tier phones like the Moto G are less powerful, but they still run Android just fine, and they use a lot less battery power. These phones can easily last 2-3 days on a single charge. The one exception is when you use the GPS, in which case you need to keep it (or any phone) plugged in to a charger constantly while using that feature.
I have WIRED landlines in my house, not just cordless. Next to my bed and in the kitchen. I have the cell phone. I have the battery packs, chargers, and all that.
Pager, no. Never again.
The wired phones were installed the day after the cell phone was dead, and the cordless phone too. A concerned coworker ended up showing up with the cops at 3am...
Laugh, it's good for you!
We all have pagers. They work in places where cell phones will not.
I'm not gay and I love you
And that's why you don't work in emergency services. Reliability Engineering is a thing, and every additional link in the chain adds additional failure points.
And single failure points are also a problem, which is why 15 years ago we switched from a single phone number shared physically, to simple systems capable of calling multiple numbers. Things happen to people and equipment, and I've seen on call people end up in car accidents, get a shared page soaked in water, and get mugged. Automated systems that call a person and their supervisor, and keeps calling more people until the problem is dealt with, is about as reliable as it gets for a given sized team. If it is important enough, then you'll deal with the inconvenience of an a person not on call getting called because of problems further up the chain.
Fax machines are still standard in med-legal communication, between doctors offices, lawyers, insurance companies, government agencies, process servers, courts, companies that copy records...I'm sure I left some entities out.
I know, cause I don't have one.
My HTC One M8 gets just over two days of standby time and up to a day of battery if I'm actively using it. If your phone is dying at the worst times, get a phone that doesn't suck.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I live in Japan. No, fax machines are not common here anymore. Most established businesses probably still have one in case someone wants to send them a fax, but that's true everywhere. A startup wouldn't think of wasting money on one. According to the article you can still buy cassette tapes in most convenience stores. Nope. Just checked. And traffic lights here are automatic, just like everywhere else. Where there is roadwork, there may be humans present to manage traffic. Just like in the west.
There is an unending stream of "XXX in Japan!" bullshit constantly streaming out of the western mass media. Is it because they think nobody will fact check them?
Total coverage.
Several weeks on one battery.
Receives only important information.
They will have to pry it from my dead hands!
Amazon still uses pages for their oncall, because pagers still have a better SLA than cellphones. However, it comes at a price: their communications are unencrypted, and work on a broadcast basis. Also, they don't do a store-and-forward type thing (their "redundancy" is done by just broadcasting each message a certain number of times spaced apart), so if you're outside of the coverage area when a page goes off you'll never get it (unlike with SMS where most carriers will hold on to it until it's been delivered) so it's still not totally reliable. Personally I would recommend setting up a Twilio app that sends the message to email and SMS, and if not responded to within a certain period of time, starts calling phone numbers and using their text-to-speech API.
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
My Nokia 3510i would last 3 days easily, and often managed 5 or so without a recharge. It was also quite good as a phone. When it was on vibrate, I could actually feel it.
You can probably set up call forwarding so if your main phone dies, it goes to the backup.
Rather than going with a pager which is one-way, or getting a battery pack for the smart phone (Which will make it even more brick-like than it is already), just do what I did and pick up an old Nokia phone!
If you get one with a monochrome display, the battery will last over a week even when used, whereas most smart phones won't even last a day if you actually use them, and it is much smaller and compact than the ridiculously large slabs that smart phones have become.
You lose out on fancy stuff like being able to browse the web or access twitbook but if all you need is a mobile phone then you can't beat it. Literally! Whereas smartphones get damaged if you even look at them funny, an old Nokia is practically indestructible.
...(in Japan) and a lot of people keep landlines, too.
Err, yes - I believe the rest of the modern world would have landlines in the future, it's called Fibre Cable. It has long replaced the old Copper Wire, and wireless is still inferior to landlines. The speed of the light is the way to go.
Here in Sweden a lot of us have 100/10 to 1000/1000mbit lines, they're all fibre cable with ping times and speed you can only dream of in a wireless scenario.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Oh heck yes... as well as my old Nokia (Weeks worth of charge, indestructible, actually fits in a normal pocket), I still have my 'Palm Pilot' (A Sony Clié TH55 - Charge lasts just under a week, can input data without having to look at the screen, the interface still somehow manages to be as responsive as modern smart phones with 10x the CPU speed and RAM...).
Fax machines? Still used; Staff just find it convenient as they haven't gotten the hang of scanning stuff in and attaching to e-mail, plus some things still have to go over fax as electronic copies are not accepted for legal reasons. We also have dot matrix printers for similar reasons (Carbon-paper copies!)
Then there is old PC's - We have lots of old software that doesn't work on modern hardware, never mind modern operating systems, although there's been some experimentation with VM's for it.
Landlines, yup - We like them because they can be relied on to work in emergencies, whereas cell-phones tend to crap out if there is e.g. a powercut that knocks out the local cell-tower (Thankfully most now have UPS' so this isn't as big an issue now) or overload from too many people trying to call at once.
The UK's national health service uses pagers for almost all rapid staff contact. And faxes are still used throughout most of the organisation for rapid transfer of information between primary and secondary care.
911#420
...tell you that your phone has drained the battery and turned off cause SomeAppTM decided to drain you battery while trying to connect to the internet to download the latest fart noises?
Point of a low-battery-use always-on device is that it is "turn-on and forget".
Not that you CAN plug it in to charge five times a day or swap batteries when you notice that it is off.
Spare battery is just another battery that you have to keep charged and carry with you - that only lasts hours instead of weeks or months.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I don't see how this can possibly be a problem for a functioning adult human. Your phone has a more accurate fuel gauge than your car, and is infinitely easier to refuel when low:
- There are very inexpensive and highly portable USB phone chargers powered by AA batteries, built-in high capacity rechargeable Li-Ion batteries, PV solar panels, hand-cranks, etc, etc.
- Slightly less portable are pocket-sized "travel" chargers that plug into 100v-240v, 50/60Hz utility power. These are convenient if (instead of hunting wild game through the forest) you sit down to eat in a building (that may or may not be called a restaurant) roughly 3 times per day, like most of the rest of people who live in the 1st world. IMPORTANT NOTE: These chargers will work even while you're not eating, such as while you are at home, in a hotel suite, visiting friends, or working in an office.
- And finally closing out the list are 12-24V automotive USB phone chargers, which will quickly replenish your phone's battery while it, and you, are spending time in an automobile, even if you don't happen to own the automobile in question...
Note that all of these options will replenish your phone's battery, and extend its run-time, even while you are using your phone and would otherwise be draining the battery.
I'm guessing they don't just enjoy your quick and witty replies... Being able to send them a short e-mail from your pager probably won't keep them happy for long. In most cases, being paged is just a precursor to an important telephone call, which is not going to be possible if your cellphone battery is dead. It may also require a follow-up where you look-up some important notes from your records, or otherwise load some data from the internet. All things your pager won't help you to do, but a fully-charged cellphone likely will.
Actually, I'm finding it hard to believe your quick response is all that important to anyone, if you lack even the rudimentary ability to keep a cellphone charged and operational through the day. This sounds more like a question about a parent keeping track of an irresponsible child.
It's much easier to let a horse graze on the side of the road
This is a false-dichotomy, anyhow, as it's clear you want to continue to use your phone. So the pager will be extra work and cost on top of that... absolutely NOT eliminating any effort for you, at all.
No. Nobody has a pager, and nobody finds them useful.
"the number of such devices in use has been plummeting each year"
"We are turning down the service because very few people still use it," says Telus spokesman Chris Garretson. "This is thirty-year-old technology — the infrastructure is aging and replacement parts are difficult to get."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technol...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It's called weighing the benefits. The benefits of a modern smart phone far outweigh the limited benefit of a reliable pager for the vast majority of scenarios.
First off nobody said you have to give up your smartphone in order to use a pager.
Second off, reliability is the only advantage of a pager, so if you do not need reliability, then hell no you don't need a pager.
Your original post is still ridiculous; the idea that you'd turn down a company because they offer a more reliable emergency contact is just stupid.
You are the real MVP.
Never owned a pager. Wish I didn't have a leash^H^H^H^H^H cell phone.
Get a decent phone you backward bastard.
We must acknowledge pages within 5 minutes, so we need two-way pagers with reasonable latency, and we like to deliver them over two radio channels, ex. two different cel carriers. Skytel used to be fine as one of them: it could do the job for mrc of $20 as of 2011. There is only one two-way pager company in the US, AFAIK, and that is Skytel which is now called American Messaging. They still sell paging plans. I asked for a new plan, and it's even cheaper than before: paid quarterly, it's about $10/mo. There are multiple "plans" etc., but whatever. Although they don't exist outside the US, where they have coverage they have advantages:
- more convenient and reliable terminal than Android. It is a relief to be around a pager after being saturated with these fashion-driven CADT phones.
- no device-bricking updates
- no radio lockups requiring cycling airplane mode
- no fiddling with how the ringer works, "high priority" notifications, "doze mode". By default it has two modes, ring and vibrate, clearly settable, and both of them do renotification for unread messages.
- no spurious reboots
- no spammy notifications for things other than pages that need constant unsubscribe-fiddling
- 10x battery life
- smaller and more durable
- qwerty keyboard: faster input
- screen is clearly visible in direct sunlight or darkness, without blinding you
tl;dr it is a clearly superior device for the task in almost every way.
- independent from cel network. We like to have two systems with uncorrelated failures to deliver pages because it's important not to miss them.
- hassle-free and consistently-working email interface (slightly better than the email interface carriers offer to SMS and most competitors to them like Vitelity).
- unlike one's expectation for a pager, the "two-way" feature includes recollecting pages you missed by moving out of coverage, similar to SMS, and this works well though blows the latency budget obviously
- there is a privacy-nut "transmitter off" mode that allows you to still receive pages, if you don't move too far from the last place where you turned on the transmitter (eg city granularity), without being tracked by the gub'mint.
We mostly-replaced them with dumbphones on Ting because:
- coverage is worsening. It could be the devices are getting beaten up and receiving less well, but all pagers are used pagers so we have no way to order a fresh one, and there's no procedure I know of to get an old one calibrated. It could be the cash-strapped operating company is shutting down towers. It could be imagination and changing expectations. but the gap with celfone coverage is getting unacceptable.
- latency is unpredictable. It went from being more predictable than SMS to less predictable.
We deliver pages to the Ting dumbphones using a text-to-speech gateway. Some people use an SMS fast-path, but text-to-speech is more reliable than SMS so most have that in place as a backup. I use it with the rule, "voice-call me if I have not acked in 2.5 minutes," for example.
Another disadvantage, shared by pagers and ting:
- there is no polling mode, "prove that I have not gotten a page in the last 5 minutes. If you can't prove it, page me." Yes, there are coverage indicators, but they are basically worthless: coverage indicator doesn't prove you can receive a page, neither on ting nor skytel, and there's no feature to page you when coverage goes away like Nextel used to have.
We have an experimental channel that does polling, and it's an improvement over plain Android without the embellishment because it warns you about reception but also catches problems like the disgustingly-common radio lockups. but because the chan
Get a phone with a better capacity battery, keep on charge when not walking with it, and ditch apps that use a lot of data that aren't work related.
I chose a BLU Studio Energy. Dual sim slots so I have my business number and my personal number in one phone. 3 days between charging if I want to push it. (I do a lot of data)
http://www.bluproducts.com/index.php/studio-energy
NRRPT/RCT
Iridium has two pager-like tools:
- traditional pager. $173/mo + $800 device
- delorme inreach. $65/mo + $290 device
Prices are for unlimited pages.
Traditional pager advantages:
- better reception. It still doesn't work as reliably indoors as a phone, but it does work inside some buildings while delorme inreach certainly will not. The network sends each page to you several times and adds sequence numbers to the messages. The pager will extrapolate "missed message" warnings for you. However I don't know any way to retrieve the missed messages, only to know they have occurred. and to know for certain you may need to send yourself a page periodically to get a fresh sequence number; just exposing yourself to the sky for an hour isn't enough to get the warnings.
- email interface: super-easy to integrate with ops stuff. To send pages to delorme inreach you have to screen-scrape. It looks possible but tbqh I haven't figured it out yet.
- long battery life. It runs about three weeks on one AA.
- no transmitter. Your location can't be tracked. though you must manually provide it on a web page to a granularity somewhat larger than US area code, ex. "Germany" is a zone.
delorme inreach advantages:
- two way. You can send SMS, email, and faceposts. It updates its location using the uplink so you don't need to use the web page to set your zone; it justworx.
- fancy "cloud" features. It's meant for hikers and mountain climbers, so it reports your location on a web map to track your hike's progress every 10min. It has a bluetooth connection to android/iphone and includes subscription to delorme's second-rate topographic maps app. The GPS is better than what's in phones and definitely does not have the surprising "only works with carrier coverage" so-called-but-not-really AGPS gotchya of many phones. You can send messages from the app over bluetooth, so you can use the android keyboard to type them.
- totally-reliable reception whenever you can see the sky. almost-guaranteed no reception when you cannot. In a car or an airplane, it will work, unreliably, iff you push it up against a window.
- there is a user-visible "last check-in" timestamp. You will have gotten all messages up to this timestamp with pretty high confidence. You also get an explicit L2 ack for messages you send. What they're able to deliver users on this underpowered device, on a carrier built in 90s that costs delorme ~$1/kByte, is an embarrassment to Hangouts.
- the hardware is currently-manufactured, so it's cheap and is still getting firmware updates.
- service is 1/3 the cost. service has "month-to-month" modes meant for camping. You are charged a yearly cost because fuck-you-pay-me, $20-$30. Then you can go to a web page and turn it on or off each month.
- water-resistant
disadvantages of delorme:
- privacy. cumbersome cloud service with lots of data-retention is semi-mandatory. GPS metadata seems attached to most messages.
- battery life. It depends on the page latency you request. It's about 18 hours at 2min latency, 30 hours at 10min latency.
- no keyboard. receiving messages is not so bad, but sending anything except a preset reply without the bluetooth tether to android keyboard is painful.
disadvantages shared by both:
- no encryption
Iridium is the oldest satellite network, which sounds bad but is not. It's bad in that it's low-bandwidth, yes, but they overspent on it. It's the largest constellation in number of satellites which means that it's flying low and has truly global coverage, and transmitting at a low frequency, so it may be the best one for making a pager. but I could be wrong.
After trying both for a while, my plan is to use the traditional pager, and keep an Android phone from Google Fi in airplane mode. Perhaps because of the carrier auto-switching, the N6 radio is fast to acquir
I see a lot of adversisements coming across here as articles. Stopped reading this one at #feeltheburn
It would be nice of the mods kept irrelevant plugs off the site.
Are sails really more reliable than diesel engines. I thought sails had a problem with not working when there wasn't any wind, or the wind was blowing in the wrong direction.
Another way of communicating for free and self reliant (no need for network access or authentication) is CB radio.
Also known as FRS, GMRS and BRS depending on where you live in the world.
Just like pagers is more a thing from the past with everyone now staring at their phones and paying so much money to maintain them but it is an absolute must for quick short range communications or for when going on a convoy or journey where it can be used in an emergency.
it sounds like you keep forgeting to charge your phone. so get a pager and then you can forget to charge both.
Up until recently, the on-call team I managed had a pager, and I had to defend it's use several times when people wanted to switch to just calling mobile phones.
But staff don't like customers calling their phones in the middle of the night, and invariably, customers call whoever they feel like, not the on-call person, so most of the on-call team turned their phones off at night, and just slept with the pager.
This way, if their sleep was interrupted, they knew it was a genuine emergency and not some customer asking them to check if there was an issue. And the callout bonus made the sleep interruption worthwhile to them.
I've never seen a roll-up cable that can actually handle 1 A current. The wires are too thin; the phone will detect a voltage drop when it draws current and limit the current. It's more like 300-500 mA.
Strange, I've never found a roll-up cable that *doesn't*. Maybe you should switch the brand you're using ?
I've have success with both Hama brand and the internal brand sold at Conrad.
Currently using renkforce cables.
All of these are correctly used by the phone, and the phone's own system software reports charging at 1A.
Maybe your problems actually come from the *wallwart charger itself*.
The official USB specs only state for 500mA max current (and that's only after software negotiation. Otherwise it's 100mA straigh out of the box. But except for the OpenMoko I've never seen a phone that doesn't go straight for 500mA)
1A isn't an actual USB standard (neither 2.1A for that matters).
Most charger advertise this higher current support with special tricks on the data lines (short them, put a resistor accross them, etc.)
Maybe your phone doesn't correctly recognise this ? (charger and phone using two different way to advertise higher current ?)
Old Hama chargers used to come with a small USB dongle that you could plug in between the charger and the cable called an "iPhone adapter". That would short the data lines in a different way which was better detected by iPhones and other phones (e.g.: my Palm Pre and HP Palm3) that fail to detect the 1A otherwise.
Also useful for charging smartphones from a desktop PC (most of the desktop motherboard are able to deliver USB currents way beyond the 500mA spec without any hard. 1A is entirely possible on lots of motherboard, though not officially supported. One should do the research before frying an important motherboard).
My only problem with the thin wires of roll-up cables, is that over time, they tend to get worn-up a bit faster than regular ones.
(Though even regular cables wear eventually with all the pocket-transport-abuse).
But at least roll-ups don't tangle.
Samsung makes compact phone chargers for their low-end smartphones that do 700 mA and include a flexible wire with micro-USB on one end. Much less bulky than a separate USB cable.
My use of a separate USB roll-up is:
- can be used for other uses (quickly plugin the phone into an USB port for data transmission)
- can leave the charger itself available to be plugged in: some powerbank have a direct USB prong
- is easier to replace (its the most delicate part of my setup and gets worn up first. cheaper to replace just the cable rather than a whole charger-roll-up combo).
As for UK plugs: stick the back of a teaspoon or similar object into the third, ground, hole, to open up the other two. Then, a euro plug will fit just fine. It probably violates electrical codes to do so, but whatever.
The whole point is about having something small and compact fitting into the pocket. :-P )
I'm not sure about you, but I clearly don't have the habit of carrying around a spare metal tea-spoon in my pocket. (Must be a British thing...
More seriously, I've seen safer (as in not plugging random metallic objects into household power outlets) alternative solutions:
- I've seen special outlets that can open the phase/neutral holes without a ground prong. The side holes open when two prongs are inserted at the exact same time (something which happens when an europlug is plugged in, but something which is NOT going to happen often when a toddler tries poking the holes with a sharp object). It's popular on universal plug adapters and the same mechanism is slowly gaining traction in other countries with 3-pronged plugs (Switzerland, maybe Italy too ?)
- I've seen Euro power cord with a retractable plastic piece where the ground prong should be. Plugs into any standard euro-compatible outlet with the plastic retracted, and opens and connects to UK outlets with the plastic deployed.
I don't know if this idea has ever moved out of the power-cords and into wallwarts. All the UK-ready wall warts I've seen use exchangeable face-plates (EU, UK and US/JP)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Reread the post, I didn't make that claim. Though I understand the author's sentiment. I believe they meant the company's primary point of contact being a pager is problematic, as it could indicate someone very unsophisticated with modern technologies. A similar concern is when the company's email address is one from aol.com. It is a valid warning indicator.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
believe they meant the company's primary point of contact being a pager ...
1) That's not what the post said. It said as "a point of contact".
2) Seriously? You really think that because somebody has a pager that's a "valid warning indicator" that they do not have a cell phone???
Yes. If someone only lists a page number, and not a cell number, then that worries me about their availability and familiarity with modern technology. I may hire them as a plumber, but for a technology-related service I would consider looking elsewhere.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Commercial paging transmitters typically radiate 1000 watts of effective power, resulting in a much wider coverage area per tower than a mobile phone transmitter, which typically radiates around 0.6 Watts per channel.
This is a huge advantage for emergency services.
It's called USB Battery Charging Specification and it's not a special trick.
I haven't been paying attention that the various hacks have eventually gotten standardised. Thank you for the pointer.
I admit that the roll-up cables that I have are all from (various, euro-equivalent) dollar stores, but I did actually measure the current passing through. What I see is that phones/tablet built-in chargers have a series of current settings, e.g. 300, 600, 900, 1200 mA and that they will take the highest one that does not cause the voltage to drop too much.
My Jolla goes to the highest available charging profile (1100mA) on my current setup.
If the cable is the only difference between your phone switching to 600mA or 1200mA profiles, then you should definitely try other brands (speaking of euro-zone: I definitely have good luck at conrad).
Or maybe it's showing early signs of being worn.
Combined with the fact that wall warts and power banks have output voltages varying between 4.8 and 5.2 V it's a lot of hit-or-miss.
Part of the reason why I avoid buying dead cheap no-name asian accessories. They cut corners to get that cheap and might trade voltage output quality (or worse, trade some safety feature, as might have been the case with fire started by some of the cheapest chinese "hoverboards" electric segway-thingies)
The best way to ensure that the cable resistance is not a limiting factor is to use AWG 24 (0.2 mm2) wires, but those are rather thick for a roll-up cable.
Either that, or realising that you don't need a 3km-long charging cables. Mine are even less than 1m, maybe that's also why I've got less resistive problems.
I am neither a spoon carrier...
...relieved that you're not a Ginosaji :-D
When I travel, I usually have many USB-chargeable things around: my and my SO's phones, tablet, several power banks. I'd prefer to have one data-capable USB cable and not so many USB-A connectors for charging.
My approach is a (little bit bulky) 25W charger with 5x USB output (with some of the ports able to deliver up to 2.1A, if the total load permits).
Has a standard IEC 60320 C8 (aka "figure of 8") electric coupler, and I have a corresponding powercord with retractable prongs that can be pluged in most power outlets.
It's slightly bigger than a smartphone or high-capacity powerbank, so it's not something I keep in my pocket, but it *the* thing to bring in my backpack when abroad. I'm fed-up having to fight for the single free power outlet in the room. Specially since I'm a huge geek and have several devices to charge.
Having a microUSB-to-lightning adapter for when the girl has an iPhone helps.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I am an EMT and have a pager and it is not just useful it is absolutely essential.
Caveat: I live in Green Bank, WVa. The city without cell phones, wifi etc etc.
I think pagers are still pretty widespread in the emergency services. At least volunteer departments where we are on call 24/7 and not sat in a station when on duty.
UNIX: 'cuz you can tattoo it on your knuckles!