What to Put Your Finger on as You Consider Pagers
As nice as it sometimes is to be unreachable, most folks who run their own business know it can be disastrous if an important customer, client, employee or business partner urgently needs to get hold of you. In my own business as a freelance journalist, I can think of several occasions when missing a phone call would have resulted in a missed opportunity.
Fortunately, there are a number of ways to remain reachable when you’re not at the office. Carrying a cellular phone is one, but they are expensive and not always reliable. I usually carry a cellular phone and a pager, but I don’t give out my cell phone number to many people. Instead, I encourage people to page me. If I can’t get to a regular phone, I’ll use my cell phone to call back.
Although no wireless device is 100% reliable, pagers are pretty good at picking up signals as long as you’re in the coverage area. And now there are paging systems that keep trying until they reach you.
Not all pagers and paging services are alike. Just about all paging companies offer basic “beep me” numeric paging. For as little as $6 a month, you can have people use a touch-tone phone to enter the number where you can call back.
These systems are great for getting messages from your office, your home or friends and business associates whose numbers you recognize. But if you get a page from someone else, you have no idea who tried to reach you until you return the call. If that person is at a hotel or a business with one number that serves lots of people, you may have trouble returning the call.
Alphanumeric pagers solve that problem by letting the person enter a real message. Skytel, PageNet, Airtouch and other companies that offer alphanumeric paging typically offer three ways that people can send you messages: They can call a toll-free number and dictate the message to an operator. (You’ll pay about 60 cents per message for the service. From my experience, the caller may have to wait on hold for a while if all the operators are busy.) Most major paging companies will assign an e-mail address to your pager, and several allow people to send pages from their Web sites (point your browser to https://www. larrysworld.com/pagers.htm for links to these page and pager sites).
Sending a page via the Internet may be convenient, but Internet mail can be delayed or misrouted. The Skytel software is more reliable because it uses a dedicated network rather than the Internet. Skytel offers Windows and Macintosh services that people can use to send you a page even if they don’t have access to the Internet.
In addition to standard numeric and alphanumeric paging, Skytel offers two-way paging and the new SkyWord Plus alphanumeric paging. Both of these services can deliver messages even if you’re out of range when the message is sent, and both provide nationwide paging.
At $24.95 for either one-way or two-way service, these systems are, ironically, cheaper to use than Skytel’s other nationwide one-way paging option that doesn’t provide guaranteed message delivery. That is possible because pagers on this system have built-in transmitters that confirm you have received the message and that tell the network which city you’re in. If you travel to another city, the network knows where you are and sends the page to that location. The only downside to these services is that you’ll need special pagers that typically cost more to buy or rent.
I carry a two-way Skytel pager that has a small “virtual keyboard” that allows me to send and receive alphanumeric pages. I can exchange pages with any other Skytel pager or send and receive Internet e-mail. The keyboard is awkward to use, but the pager is able to store a number of canned responses like “yes,” “no,” “I’ll call you later” and “running late,” which you can easily select as a quick response to a page or an e-mail. Most of the time I just use it as a one-way pager, but occasionally I use it to generate or respond to an e-mail message.
When shopping for a pager, there are several options that can add extra convenience and cost. One is voicemail. Many paging companies will allow callers to leave you a detailed voice message, then alert you with a page. You won’t know who called until you check your voicemail, though. Many paging services assign a dedicated phone number for you to give out, and some offer a toll-free number for an extra charge. In some cases the caller will have to punch in the phone number and a special PIN (personal identification number). For an extra fee, most paging companies will provide you an 800 number that answers in your voice.
Before you buy a pager, ask what it costs to rent it. Skytel, for example, charges $150 for a one-way Skyword Plus pager and $322 for a two-way pager, but you can rent the units for $10 or $15 a month respectively. Considering how fast technology is changing, that might turn out to be a better deal.
*
You may write to Lawrence J. Magid at magid@latimes.com. His Web site is at https://www.larrysworld.com
