Yes, Hospitals are probably the biggest customer of paging companies. Most hospitals have in-house repeaters for better coverage than a cellphone. Especially in the underground morgue in the basement.
You are also likely to have better coverage in and around larger cities ensuring you receive the page (a must for medical professionals) and some technologies will resend pages if the device does not confirm receipt.
As for "banana" phones... (please, don't start singing that damned song!) it depends on the facility I guess. Once the infrastructure is in place in a hospital, it's about as expensive as a high-end PBX desk phone so restricting it to a few important doctors just isn't required.
I work at a Hospital that uses "spectralink" phones - also called banana phones or bat phones depending on the yellow or black case it's in. They are a strictly in-house addition to the PBX system (you may be able to get a signal up to a few hundred feet outside the building, but that's it) and do not interfere with life support systems, wifi, etc.
I doubt any doctors actually have their own, it's mostly administration, management and other key people around the facility. Most departments will have a few "spares" which are rotated around with the staff... So you can always reach the in-house anesthesiologist on call by dialing a given number - but it could be any one of several people who answer depending on who's working that day.
If you need a specific doctor, you just page them.
For the same reason that people who don't pay attention to what website they are on and whether it is secure or not before putting in their login information, credit card numbers, or other sensitive information - Those who fall for something like this would almost deserve to be taken advantage of, just to teach them a lesson...
Unfortunately, I can see people falling for such a lame scheme - heck, even an email with a phone number asking them to call to verify something on their account would be enough to fool some people.
But back to the main problem with this whole idea: Currently it isn't very feasible - in the future when Micro$oft develops VoIP phonebook and click-to-dial integration with Outlook, and millions of people fall for their software again only to be shocked and amazed that it has so many security holes, I'm sure this will be a definite possibility.
On a side note, and not to in ANY way defend Micro$oft - but they do receive a lot of flack over bug-ridden software compared to open source. Nobody takes into account the amount of end-users (your typical, no-nothing, novice, home user) their software has, compared to open source which makes the number of casualties higher, and attracts those seeking to do the exploitation making the numbers even higher, and so on and so forth, and you get my point, I'll shut up now.
The culprit would be you for being so naive - stop looking for conspiracies and get a life:)
As for the Google "click to call" service, this is certainly a non-issue. There is little potential for abuse, along with little incentive in the first place... Lauren claims how CID should NEVER be manipulated, but she doesn't know what she's talking about and should learn a few things before making wild statements such as this.
As a company who utilizes VoIP to save money, we have several terminating (outgoing) services we can use depenting on the destination of the call. These providers of course do not provide my company with the same toll-free incoming number but when I place a call using any of them I need to be able to set the CID to that of my number to 1. look professional, 2. let my customer know who is calling.
A more expensive way of doing this would involve having your own phone trunks and DID numbers along with a phone system that allows you to assign which extention rings when DID is dialed, and what CID shows up from each phone that places a call. This isn't as simple as "assign this number to this phone" it's more like "did 1234 goes to extention 202 but if 202 dials out, our defaul number 1000 is sent to CID while DID 1111 is assigned to ext 203 and 1111 is sent to CID.." this allows companies to control how their phone system works so that (for example) the CEO can have his own private DID for his family/friends to call him, but if he makes a call it shows up as his secretaries ext.
I've rambled enough, point is: CID has to be modified in some cases... Yes, there is potential for abuse but it's the responsibility of the providers to monitor and protect against it. After a few minutes of installing a sip client on a pc and signing up for some wholesale sip service, depositing $10 for $0.011/min phone calls to anywhere in the us, and setting up the software to spoof the CID, someone could be prank calling all day long - the technology is out there already and costs next to nothing...
The only potential of abuse for this Google service is a few 12 year olds who may get a few minutes of fun thinking they are annoying someone when in reality some grandma somewhere just things her phone is acting funny and forgets about it an hour later.
I also agree with a previous post - Google just needs to add a small recording and menu to be played to the callee before connecting them to the business. Perhaps with a "report abuse" option for those who don't want to block their number from use by Google... "Hello, this is Google - you are receiving this phone call because someone requested a click-to-call from our website. To connect to the business you chose, press 1 - If you didn't ask for this service, simply hang up or press 2 to block your number from future click-to-call calls from Google. To report abuse of this service, press 3."
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Yes, Hospitals are probably the biggest customer of paging companies. Most hospitals have in-house repeaters for better coverage than a cellphone. Especially in the underground morgue in the basement.
You are also likely to have better coverage in and around larger cities ensuring you receive the page (a must for medical professionals) and some technologies will resend pages if the device does not confirm receipt.
Check out http://www.usamobility.com/
As for "banana" phones... (please, don't start singing that damned song!) it depends on the facility I guess. Once the infrastructure is in place in a hospital, it's about as expensive as a high-end PBX desk phone so restricting it to a few important doctors just isn't required.
I work at a Hospital that uses "spectralink" phones - also called banana phones or bat phones depending on the yellow or black case it's in. They are a strictly in-house addition to the PBX system (you may be able to get a signal up to a few hundred feet outside the building, but that's it) and do not interfere with life support systems, wifi, etc.
I doubt any doctors actually have their own, it's mostly administration, management and other key people around the facility. Most departments will have a few "spares" which are rotated around with the staff... So you can always reach the in-house anesthesiologist on call by dialing a given number - but it could be any one of several people who answer depending on who's working that day.
If you need a specific doctor, you just page them.
For the same reason that people who don't pay attention to what website they are on and whether it is secure or not before putting in their login information, credit card numbers, or other sensitive information - Those who fall for something like this would almost deserve to be taken advantage of, just to teach them a lesson...
Unfortunately, I can see people falling for such a lame scheme - heck, even an email with a phone number asking them to call to verify something on their account would be enough to fool some people.
But back to the main problem with this whole idea: Currently it isn't very feasible - in the future when Micro$oft develops VoIP phonebook and click-to-dial integration with Outlook, and millions of people fall for their software again only to be shocked and amazed that it has so many security holes, I'm sure this will be a definite possibility.
On a side note, and not to in ANY way defend Micro$oft - but they do receive a lot of flack over bug-ridden software compared to open source. Nobody takes into account the amount of end-users (your typical, no-nothing, novice, home user) their software has, compared to open source which makes the number of casualties higher, and attracts those seeking to do the exploitation making the numbers even higher, and so on and so forth, and you get my point, I'll shut up now.
The culprit would be you for being so naive - stop looking for conspiracies and get a life :)
As for the Google "click to call" service, this is certainly a non-issue. There is little potential for abuse, along with little incentive in the first place... Lauren claims how CID should NEVER be manipulated, but she doesn't know what she's talking about and should learn a few things before making wild statements such as this.
As a company who utilizes VoIP to save money, we have several terminating (outgoing) services we can use depenting on the destination of the call. These providers of course do not provide my company with the same toll-free incoming number but when I place a call using any of them I need to be able to set the CID to that of my number to 1. look professional, 2. let my customer know who is calling.
A more expensive way of doing this would involve having your own phone trunks and DID numbers along with a phone system that allows you to assign which extention rings when DID is dialed, and what CID shows up from each phone that places a call. This isn't as simple as "assign this number to this phone" it's more like "did 1234 goes to extention 202 but if 202 dials out, our defaul number 1000 is sent to CID while DID 1111 is assigned to ext 203 and 1111 is sent to CID.." this allows companies to control how their phone system works so that (for example) the CEO can have his own private DID for his family/friends to call him, but if he makes a call it shows up as his secretaries ext.
I've rambled enough, point is: CID has to be modified in some cases... Yes, there is potential for abuse but it's the responsibility of the providers to monitor and protect against it. After a few minutes of installing a sip client on a pc and signing up for some wholesale sip service, depositing $10 for $0.011/min phone calls to anywhere in the us, and setting up the software to spoof the CID, someone could be prank calling all day long - the technology is out there already and costs next to nothing...
The only potential of abuse for this Google service is a few 12 year olds who may get a few minutes of fun thinking they are annoying someone when in reality some grandma somewhere just things her phone is acting funny and forgets about it an hour later.
I also agree with a previous post - Google just needs to add a small recording and menu to be played to the callee before connecting them to the business. Perhaps with a "report abuse" option for those who don't want to block their number from use by Google... "Hello, this is Google - you are receiving this phone call because someone requested a click-to-call from our website. To connect to the business you chose, press 1 - If you didn't ask for this service, simply hang up or press 2 to block your number from future click-to-call calls from Google. To report abuse of this service, press 3."