Who uses pagers anymore anyway?

As mobile phones became the world’s primary means of communication, pagers (also called beepers because of the sound they make to alert users to incoming messages) became largely obsolete. Demand for these devices declined from their heyday in the 1990s.

However, these small electronic devices are still an important means of communication in certain sectors, 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 a response,” said a senior surgeon at a major British hospital, adding that pagers are widely used by doctors and nurses in the country’s National Health Service (NHS).

“It is used to tell people where to go, when and for what.”

Pager messages made headlines on Tuesday when thousands of pagers used by members of the militant group Hezbollah were detonated simultaneously across Lebanon, killing at least nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others.

According to a senior Lebanese security source and another source, the explosives were placed in the devices by Israel’s spy agency Mossad.

According to the government, the UK NHS used around 130,000 pagers in 2019, more than one in every 10 pagers in the world. More recent 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 the same time, a senior NHS doctor said. That’s not possible with a mobile phone.

Britain’s Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) is using pagers to alert its crew, a source familiar with the rescue service told Reuters. The RNLI declined to comment.

Pagers are harder to track than smartphones because they lack modern navigation technologies such as the Global Positioning System, or GPS.

This has made them a popular choice among criminals in the past, especially drug dealers in the United States.

But gangs are increasingly using cellphones today, former FBI agent Ken Gray told Reuters.

“I don’t know if anyone uses them (beepers),” he said.

“They all switched to cell phones, disposable phones,” which you can easily throw away and replace with another phone with a different number, making them difficult 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, says criminals change with the times and new 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’s just a fraction of the global smartphone market, estimated to be worth half a trillion US dollars by the end of 2023.

But demand for pagers is growing as a larger patient population drives the need for efficient healthcare communications, the report said, predicting a compound annual growth rate of 5.9 percent 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.

Pagers are displayed in a meeting room at the Gold Apollo corporate building in New Taipei City, Taiwan, September 18, 2024. REUTERS/Ann Wang