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Japan's Final Pager Provider To End Its Service In 2019 (bbc.com)
Tokyo Telemessage, Japan's last pager provider, has announced that it will end service to its 1,500 remaining users in September 2019. It will bring a national end to telecommunication beepers, 50 years after their introduction. The BBC reports: The once-popular devices are able to receive and show wireless messages. Users would then find a phone to call the sender back. Developed in the 1950s and 1960s, they grew in popularity in the 1980s. By 1996, Tokyo Telemessage had 1.2 million subscribers. However, the rise of mobile phones rendered the pager obsolete, and few remain worldwide. Emergency services, however, continue to use the reliable technology -- including in the UK.
I'm surprised. Are they going out in the US too? I thought E.R. doctors and surgeons would always carry pagers because the messages have guaranteed delivery unlike SMS.
Pager companies would buy sequential blocks of numbers. So if I number xxx-xxx5 was a pager, good chance xxx-xxx4 and xxx-xxx6 were pagers too.
So I would these pagers, and enter the number of my target. All these pager owners would then call my target, who was mystified.
I came up with this when one day I dialed wrong, and a minute later the chick's insecure boyfriend *69 me back telling me not to ever call her. So I had about 20 guys call the number.
I wonder what ever happened. Maybe he killed the girlfriend in a jealous rage? Ed will never know.
i remember in ~1997 or so, an older sysadmin friend of mine (though still much younger then than i am now...) was showing off his alphapage and how he could even read emails with it. even among the nerds, not everyone had an email address back then; being able to read them wirelessly seemed like magic.
nowadays it's mostly a nuisance, and to him it also probably was, most of the time. c'est la vie, plus ça change, and all that. i suppose i should be comforted that slashdot will never have unicode support.
I miss the days when you could set your modem to dial every phone number in a paging prefix, and punch in a single persons' phone number. You could tell how well it was working by calling them up a few hours later and asking, "Hey did somebody page from this number?"
-Myke
Does anyone remember fake pagers? If you were stuck in a meeting or some other uncomfortable situation like a wedding or a funeral, you could surreptitiously push the button on your "pager", and a minute later it starts beeping. Then you can pull it off the belt clip, pretend to look at the call back number, and then frantically run out while everyone assumes you must be somebody important.
With cell phones, you can no longer get out of meetings, but at least you can play Tetris while the boss drones on and on.
I work in Healthcare, and they still love pagers here. I've been trying to get our security team to push to eliminate them, as they sent out in the clear.
From this article, following the release of pager records for 9/11.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/e...
Each digital pager is assigned a unique Channel Access Protocol code, or capcode, that tells it to pay attention to what immediately follows. In what amounts to a gentlemen's agreement, no encryption is used, and properly-designed pagers politely ignore what's not addressed to them.
But an electronic snoop lacking that same sense of etiquette might hook up a sufficiently sophisticated scanner to a Windows computer with lots of disk space -- and record, without much effort, gobs and gobs of over-the-air conversations.
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
Volunteer firefighter, small rural town in NH - we still use pagers, as do pretty much all of the towns around us. In fact, we just upgraded our pagers from low band (3X.XXMHz) to high band (3XX.XX MHz) to improve coverage. We expect to be using pagers for decades to come. There is a phone app called "I Am Responding" which uses SMS text messages to alert firefighters, who then reply that they are responding. This information shows up on a screen in the fire station, so if you're in a truck waiting on the tarmac you can tell if waiting another 3 minutes gets you more crew, or if you're better off rolling with what you have and letting late stragglers take another truck. For a system set up on text messages, it seems remarkably unreliable. Sometimes I never get the text, sometimes it comes ten minutes later. I don't believe that problem is in the texting mechanism, so it must have something to do with how dispatch is triggering the text.
I remember back in the '80s when I had a pager, we found out that the sound it made when it went off was exactly what McDonald's used to tell them their fries were ready. When we walked it, we'd go to the payphone (remember those? There were no cell phones in common use) and page ourselves, In a minute or so, the pager would go off, and Fred would go pull up the fries, which weren't quite done. Then each of your other pals you'd met for lunch would do the same thing, and the crew was constantly checking for done fries. Yeah, stupid, but sometimes stupid is funny.
One way pagers are still (generally) allowed in classified spaces. They are necessary for people that need to be reached, but can't carry a phone or other electronic 2-way device. Still a niche area, but one that is critical.
The pager companies has an agreement with their clients in their Terms of Service contract to keep the pagers operating unconditionally. This is something the cell companies can not promise for their service. Their wireline services has this agreement as well, signed in stone and painted in blood of the telecoms, with the Fed and State Public Utilities. Also a reason why they are currently playing the shell game with their ILECs, selling them to each other, until the lowest operation on the totem pole (usually Centrylink or Frontier, heaven forbid) procures them and can't foist them off on anyone else. Woe to the poor bastards that require wireline or pagers for their service and the telecoms in that given area cannot furnish.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Which slack using faggot come in here and modded you down? Those fucking slack faggots.
I was recently involved in the building of a new Children's Hospital. There are mobile phone repeater antennas all over the building and lots of Wi-Fi. There is a system called Vocera which is used more and more. Clinical staff either have a Vocera Handset [which replaces the Pager]; use a ruggedised phone with the Vocera App [it supports a type of messaging] or a normal mobile phone.
There was a small pager system as well but it was there to support existing pagers until they were replaced.
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