Who uses pagers anymore anyway?

As mobile phones became the world’s primary means of communication, pagers, also known as beepers for the sound they make to alert users to incoming messages, became largely obsolete, with demand declining from their heyday in the 1990s. But the small electronic devices remain an essential communication tool in some areas – such as healthcare and emergency services – thanks to their durability and long battery life.

“It’s the cheapest and most efficient way to communicate with a large number of people on messages that don’t require replies,” said a senior surgeon at a major UK hospital, adding that pagers are widely used by doctors and nurses in the country’s National Health Service (NHS). “It’s used to tell people where to go, when to go and what to do.”

Pagers made headlines Tuesday when thousands of them used by members of the militant group Hezbollah were detonated simultaneously across Lebanon, killing at least nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others. A senior Lebanese security source and another source said the explosives were planted in the devices by Israel’s Mossad spy agency.

Britain’s NHS used about 130,000 pagers in 2019, more than one in 10 pagers worldwide, the government said. More up-to-date figures were not available. Doctors working in hospital emergency departments carry them with them when they are on duty.

Many pagers can also sound a siren and then broadcast a voice message to groups, alerting entire medical teams to an emergency at once, a senior NHS doctor said. That’s not possible with a mobile phone. Britain’s Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) uses pagers to alert its crews, a source familiar with the rescue service told Reuters. The RNLI declined to comment.

PERSONAL PHONES Pagers are more difficult to track than smartphones because they do not have modern navigation technologies such as the Global Positioning System, or GPS.

That made them a popular choice among criminals in the past, particularly drug dealers in the United States. But gangs are using cellphones more now, former FBI agent Ken Gray told Reuters.

“I don’t know if anybody uses them (pagers),” he said. “They all went to cell phones, burner phones” that can easily be thrown away and replaced with another phone with a different number, making them hard to trace.

Gray, who spent 24 years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and now teaches criminal justice and homeland security at the University of New Haven, said criminals have changed with the times and newer technology. The global pager market, once a major source of revenue for companies like Motorola, is expected to reach $1.6 billion by 2023, according to an April report from Cognitive Market Research.

That represents a small portion of the global smartphone market, which was estimated to be worth about half a trillion U.S. dollars by the end of 2023. But demand for pagers is growing as larger patient populations create greater need for efficient healthcare communications, according to the report, which forecasts a compound annual growth rate of 5.9% from 2023 to 2030.

North America and Europe are the two largest pager markets, according to the company, with revenues of $528 million and $496 million respectively.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)