The UK's Health Service Told To Ditch 'Outdated' Pagers (bbc.com)

The UK's NHS has been told to stop using pagers for communications by 2021, in order to save money. The health service still uses about 130,000 pagers, which is about 10% of the total left in use globally. From a report: They cost the NHS about $8.6 million a year, because only one service provider supports them. Health Secretary Matt Hancock called them "outdated" and said he wanted to rid the NHS of "archaic technology like pagers and fax machines". However, many in the medical industry say that pagers are quick and reliable - especially in emergencies -- and proposed replacements have their own shortcomings.

Comments

Here is why pagers are so important

[Anonymous Coward]

They should keep the pagers, absolutely. The reason is this:

Pagers use slow transmission protocols that do not need a huge S/N to be properly decoded. That means pagers are going to work almost everywhere you would otherwise get an annoying "No Service" notification on your phone, such as elevators, parking garages, basements, and so on.

It would be a blunder of gargantuan proportions to stop using pagers for critical messaging. Just because the mobile carriers want to take over the pager spectrum for 5G doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

Re:Here is why pagers are so important

[Joce640k]

130,000 of them for $8.6 million a year. What are they going to replace them with that costs only $5.5 per month and has the same reliability?

Re:Here is why pagers are so important

[lgw]

hey should keep the pagers, absolutely. The reason is this:

Pagers use slow transmission protocols that do not need a huge S/N to be properly decoded. That means pagers are going to work almost everywhere you would otherwise get an annoying "No Service" notification on your phone, such as elevators, parking garages, basements, and so on.

Amazon made the transition from physical pagers to an app just a few years ago. Turns out that pager coverage and reliability isn't as good as you'd expect once you get down to only one vendor. Plus, in a disaster where thousands of pages get sent in a short time, you saturate the vendor's infrastructure and pages get delayed by tens of minutes.

The app also sucked at first, and most people on call used both, but within about 2 years it was more reliable on average than physical pagers, and they were lagely abandoned.

For those who don't know, Amazon cares very much about paging people. Paging doctors is merely a matter of life and death; while paging engineers when amazon.com is broke affects profit. Needless to say, far more money gets spent addressing the latter.

It is really cool though to see the machine work from the inside. When anything goes wrong anywhere that affects your ability to buy stuff on amazon.com, it takes less than five minutes before engineers representing dozens of teams are fully engaged with the problem, with most people checking in within 2-3 minutes. Problems are usually localized to one team, usually with an initial theory of cause, within about 10 minutes of the problem appearing. It's amazing to watch from the sidelines when you're not the one on the hook.