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Japan's Final Pager Provider To End Its Service In 2019 (bbc.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the sign-of-the-times dept.

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.

23 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. In the US? by SumDog · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re: In the US? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      No. I work as a clinical pharmacist. All the docs and many others, including myself, still carry one. There is no plans to discontinue their use.

    2. Re:In the US? by LordKronos · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's actually quite the opposite. Pagers have no guaranteed delivery, because they are a one way service. The pager does not ever communicate back to the tower (or at least the type most doctors carry don't). If the pager is out of range or has a poor signal at the moment the page is broadcast, you are SOL. On the other hand, SMS will at least hold the message until you connect and then make a best effort to get the message to you.

      The advantage of pagers is that they work successfully off a much weaker signal and have much broader coverage. And even more importantly, a pager runs off a AA battery that is good for months and can be swapped out with an off the shelf battery in a matter of seconds. You can't say that about any phone.

    3. Re: In the US? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      You should meet more drug dealers. They carry pagers, but more importantly: they also carry drugs. Between you and me, there's no better way to relax after a tough week at the office than mainlining some H. It's like a full body orgasm that lasts for hours.

    4. Re:In the US? by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      They're nowhere near as reliable as people think, they just use different over-the-air channels than cellular does (but often the same backhaul). So if there's a cellular outage and it's an OTA issue then pagers may still work.

      The real issue is that since cellular is used by everyone everywhere, outages get noticed and fixed at top priority while pager outages may not be noticed for awhile and there's less pressure to fix them when they do occur. So given the choice I'd take cellular, because that's the mechanism that gets all the love from its owners.

    5. Re:In the US? by spaceyhackerlady · · Score: 5, Informative

      You can get a two-way pager if you want one. There are pagers that just send in the fact that they've received a message, that it was read, or ones that can compose a message and send it in.

      I work for a paging company. Paging is very much a niche product, but a good niche product has always been a license to print money.

      ...laura

    6. Re:In the US? by Z00L00K · · Score: 2

      Another advantage is that the pager don't have a transmitter which means that it don't cause interference to EKG and EEG equipment.

      Some services also see it as an advantage to have a pager since the person having it can't be tracked. This is essential for military personnel and special operations personnel of other kinds.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    7. Re:In the US? by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve · · Score: 1

      It's actually quite the opposite. Pagers have no guaranteed delivery, because they are a one way service. The pager does not ever communicate back to the tower (or at least the type most doctors carry don't). If the pager is out of range or has a poor signal at the moment the page is broadcast, you are SOL. On the other hand, SMS will at least hold the message until you connect and then make a best effort to get the message to you.

      This is quite right. I see below that someone posted that there are 2 way pagers, which I suppose is fine to let people know that you got a page, but since paging does not use guaranteed delivery, a 2 way pager isn't a complete fix for that. The lack of guaranteed delivery is what finally got my (at the time) department manager to stop using the pager and move to calling mobile phones. We had a few instances where the only notification of a problem was via our on call pager and the on call person didn't get the page and a problem wasn't dealt with for hours.

    8. Re: In the US? by GLMDesigns · · Score: 1

      Ha. Ha. Someone on a tech site who thinks the DNC was hacked? Riight.

      --
      If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
      Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
    9. Re:In the US? by demonlapin · · Score: 1

      Hospitals are variable.

      At an academic hospital that trains residents, pagers are quite common as the frequent personnel rotations make it a lot harder to keep good phone lists, and the wide variety of origins (and thus area codes) means that hospital lines limited to local calls only won't be able to reach them. You can hand off a pager, so that there's only one number to remember when you need the anesthesiologist on call, or a respiratory therapist who's actually in the hospital.

      In a private hospital, you'll still see some handed-off pagers (like that respiratory therapist), but the doctors won't carry them; they'll all be reached by phone. ER doctors basically never carried them; if they're on-duty, they have to be in the ER (unless it's a quick run to the cafeteria or doctor's lounge for a snack), and they don't really take call - they have to have someone in house 24/7. Where I trained, the ER doctors' pagers were mostly used among themselves to send text jokes to each other (we had alphanumeric paging with a web interface).

      The real advantage of pagers was, as others have noted, that they would last a month or two on a single AA battery, and that they had excellent penetration of walls (and the ability for the hospital to install repeater equipment fairly inexpensively). If you were a big enough client, they would allow you to program your own - so if someone accidentally dropped their pager in a toilet, the telecom people at the hospital could immediately reconfigure a new one to the same number. It took until WiFi Calling became prevalent for there to be a decent alternative when you're in the bowels of the hospital.

    10. Re:In the US? by Koutarou · · Score: 1

      Not guaranteed, just orders of magnitude more reliable in places with shoddy mobile phone reception.

      I'm in Japan and carried a pager until about 10 years ago when the major carrier shut down their service. Within the first month our on-call people missed multiple pages due to signal-related issues.

  2. Used to flood call with pagers. by Blaede · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Used to flood call with pagers. by slashdice · · Score: 4, Funny

      WTF? He tracked you down and instead of kicking your ass, had oral sex with you... then told you to never call his girlfriend again? That's totally fucked up.

      --
      Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
    2. Re:Used to flood call with pagers. by Calydor · · Score: 1

      *69 is a phone code to dial back the last number to have called.

      --
      -=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
    3. Re:Used to flood call with pagers. by SeaFox · · Score: 1

      *69 is a phone code to dial back the last number to have called.

      Thinking about it now I feel like that star code choice is not an accident.
      *69 -- giving back what you just received orally.

  3. Page of revenge.. by xanadu113 · · Score: 1

    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
    1. Re:Page of revenge.. by PPH · · Score: 2

      Not that. But when I carried a pager for manufacturing support, I'd have a cron job dial my pager with a factory number and append 9-1-1. Set it to call about 10 minutes into what was going to be a very long and boring staff meeting.

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
  4. Fake pagers by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Fake pagers by jwhyche · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      When I got my first smart phone I loaded a app called fake me out of here. I could give my phone a quick shake and a few minutes later it would ring like I had a incoming call. I used this app to get me out of conversations and meetings that I didn't want to be in. Checking google, I see there are several apps that do just that.

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    2. Re:Fake pagers by Isaac-Lew · · Score: 1

      Schedule an at job for 5 minutes after the meeting starts to send an email (which your smartphone should receive) with the subject "SERVER DOWN" or something else that sounds important.

  5. Pages go out unencrypted by bubblegoose · · Score: 1

    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
  6. Contractural commitements.. by TheHawke · · Score: 1

    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.
  7. Replaced with newer techology by hoofie · · Score: 1

    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.