Slashdot Mirror
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.
A phone cannot be carried into a secure area. A (one-way) pager can.
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.
Not sure how you manage to have a phone with less than a half day of life.
My guess is that the OP is like a former boss of mine who would complain constantly about the shitty battery life of new phones yet would never charge his phone until it shut itself off because the battery ran low.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
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
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
He's a Bernie supporter. He's holding out for free energy.
We are beginning to investigate smartphone based solutions, which, in order to be compliant with US privacy regulations have expensive recurring monthly charges, and will involve installing and maintaining microcells in our hospitals.
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.
Why doesn't someone developing medical devices see this as a market and develop a pager for the medical industry if pagers are no longer being made?
It's not the pagers. It's the paging systems. The market has dropped greatly, so maintaining transmitter towers, repeaters, the whole system, is a hard business to be in. Reliability is exactly why some large medical systems run their own metro-wide paging systems.
An extra cheap non.smar phone easily lasts a week on a charge.