The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Despite Rise of Cell Phones, Pagers Haven’t Skipped a Beep
Lynn O’Rourke Hayes is in the market for a pager. Not for herself, but for her 12-year-old son Ben.
The five members of the Hayes family already share three pagers. The children use them to reach their parents whether they’re at the office or at the movies. The parents lend them to the baby sitter before she takes the kids to the mall.
The Hayeses, who live in the Phoenix suburb of Paradise Valley, have even developed a code to help them communicate by pager. A message of “5,” for example, means, “I’m going to be late.” And now that Ben has reached junior high school, mom and dad think he is old enough for a pager of his very own. “He is suddenly incredibly mobile,” Lynn Hayes explains.
The Hayes family was not what inventors had in mind 20 years ago, when the first digital pagers were being developed. For years, the wireless beeping boxes were used almost exclusively by doctors, lawyers, plumbers and others in time-sensitive professions. But today more than 24 million people use them to keep in touch with their phone messages, faxes, sports scores and even their loved ones--and subscriptions are expected to nearly double over the next five years.
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Now wait a minute. Weren’t pagers supposed to be an interim technology, awaiting quick obsolescence in a world of cellular telephones and other advanced wireless communications devices? Well, yes. But the robust health of the pager business illustrates how difficult it can be to forecast the evolution of a technology--and how price-sensitive even the most dynamic markets can be.
“We’re celebrating the 15th year of our forecasted demise--and we’re doing pretty well at it by now,” said Jim Page (yes, that is really his name), who has been working in Motorola’s pager division since 1977.
Like a horror movie villain that just won’t die, pagers keep finding ways to bring themselves back to life--by transforming themselves into stock tickers, electronic mail receptacles and daily horoscope advisers. Falling prices have made pagers affordable for the average consumer, helping beepers to join the ranks of VCRs and compact disc players as a must-have technological gadget.
And by the end of the year, two-way wireless capability will enable pagers to reply to incoming messages comprised of numbers and letters. Fifteen companies recently bid a total of $1 billion for national and regional licenses to provide two-way wireless services.
Pager owners have been known to use the devices to monitor blood sugar levels in diabetic patients, receive workout instructions from personal fitness trainers and carry on long-distance games of chess.
It wasn’t like this in the early days of wireless paging, when subscribers would get “beeped” if someone was trying to reach them. The beeper owner would then call in to retrieve the message over the phone.
Back then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, people carried beepers to stay in touch with the office. With prices as high as $200 to $300 for the pager and $25 to $30 a month for air time, few outside the businesses community could afford to buy the technology.
But soon, professionals realized they could use their corporate-issue pagers for non-business purposes.
“Companies that gave employees pagers found that most were using it more for family reasons than for business reasons,” said Hayes, who has written a book about using technology to balance the demands of work and family.
In the early days, pagers were seen as a status symbol for drug dealers, but that stereotype is long outdated, said Julie Greene, a Motorola spokeswoman. Today, most young adults who sport pagers use them to keep in touch with their parents, friends or after school jobs mowing lawns or delivering pizzas, she said.
And even for business folk who can afford a cellular phone, pagers have their uses. Industry analysts report that sales of both products have grown in tandem, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Pagers are commonly used to screen cellular phone calls, thereby keeping bills for air time low and preserving precious telephone battery time by allowing the phone to stay off until an important incoming message needs to be responded to.
“The idea of using a pager to help control your cellular service bill is a growing application,” said John Ledahl, director of wireless programs at Dataquest, a San Jose consulting firm.
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Pagers also have a broader range than most cellular phones, and their smaller size makes them more convenient than cell phones, said Richard Shaffer, a principal with the New York consulting firm Technologic Partners who claims to wear his pager “all the time, except when I’m asleep.”
But perhaps it is etiquette that sustains pagers, even while mobile phones are getting smaller and cheaper.
“There are circumstances in which it is OK to look at your pager, but it is not OK to answer your phone,” Shaffer explained. “People excuse you in a meeting for looking down to your pager, but not for answering your phone.”
Pager manufacturers, realizing that the devices are not just for business anymore, have started to build more user-friendly versions.
“The manufacturers’ response has been to make the unit more appealing,” said Dorothy Salmon, a paging analyst with the consulting firm MTA-EMCI in Washington, D.C. “They are simpler and easier to use with fewer buttons. They store more messages and have a longer battery life. The screen will light up when you want to read the message.”
Paging customers can also choose from a family of consumer-oriented devices--with names like “FreeSpirit,” “Bravo Express” and “Confidant”--at retail outlets like Kmart and Wal-Mart. In addition to standard corporate black, they come in colors like Bimini Blue, Smoke and Cranberry Ice.
And if those options are still a little staid, consumers can mail-order pager housings--the plastic container that protects the guts of the pager--from a company like Case Closed Limited. Last year, the New York company sold hundreds of thousands of containers adorned with billiard balls, zoo animals and skulls and crossbones, Vice President Rick Dweck said.
“It’s become a very big fashion statement,” said Aron Abramson, vice president of rival company Best Case and Accessories. “People sometimes buy five or six colored housings and change them to match their outfits.”
In addition to fashion accessories, pagers have also become pocket data managers, allowing users to keep up with all sorts of timely information.
Paging Network Inc., for example--the largest provider of wireless digital messaging services in the United States--offers updated weather, sports scores, news headlines, stocks and even your horoscope, sent automatically to your pager.
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Rival SkyTel offers a service to keep subscribers in touch with their faxes at a cost of $4.95 a month. And for those who can’t wait to check their electronic mail, Notable Technology of Oakland will forward an e-mail message to one’s alphanumeric pager for $19.95 a month.
Later this year, Motorola and SkyTel will introduce Tango, the industry’s first two-way pager, said Sandra Humphrey, senior marketing manager for Motorola’s Advanced Messaging Systems division. It weighs only 5.6 ounces, and its flip top acts as a transmitter. After Tango users receive pager messages, they can respond with one of up to 120 canned replies, like “yes” or “no,” “buy” or “sell,” “meet me at the office” or “I’m on my way home.”
Although the price for monthly Tango service has not yet been set, two-way pagers are widely expected to cost as much as two-thirds less to maintain than cellular phones. Ledahl predicts the air time for two-way paging could cost about $30 a month for the average user. The price and convenience of a two-way pager will make it an attractive alternative to a cellular phone, he said.
And in case you still don’t think you’re getting enough mileage out of your pager, Ted Strauss is there to help with his recent book, Pager Power. The pocket-sized volume sets forth numerical codes for more than 11,000 common (and not-so-common) words and phrases. A pager message of “615,” for example, means “Please call your mother,” and a message of “997” means “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Like many who use pagers for personal reasons, Strauss began creating codes to communicate with his girlfriend via pager. Eventually there were so many codes that friends requested copies of his ever-growing list. One finally suggested that he find a publisher.
“This is really a whole different thing than using a cellular phone,” said Strauss, a programmer at MNI Interactive in San Francisco. “It’s more like sending a letter. And it’s really cheap.”
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Pagers A-Plenty
Demand for paging services is expected to more than triple over the next 10 years, as two-way paging services grow to more than 20% of the paging market. Subscriptions to paging services, in millions:
1994: 24.5
2000: 56.2
2005: 92.2
Source: Personal Communications Industry Assn.
