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A pager is an electronic device used to contact people via a paging network. It pre-dates mobile phone technology, being most popular during the 1980s and 1990s, but similarly uses radio transmissions to communicate between a control/call center and the recipient. Many of today's pagers use the FLEX on-air protocol. The slower POCSAG on-air protocol is still used for some pagers in the United States and probably in other countries as well.
At the height of pager popularity, many drug dealers used the devices to make their connections. This has become the subject of many parodies, where a man is usually shown wearing dozens of pagers all over his body.
Early pagers only provided an audio notification, such as a series of bleeps, to indicate reception of a page. The paged party then had to telephone the control/call centre to collect the message either from an operator or an early voice mail device. Some early models included an analog audio receiver and speaker; upon receiving a page the speaker would activate, and the user would hear a human voice reciting their message. Later pagers used digital messages, first numeric and later alphanumeric, to provide the recipient with more information. Even more recent models included the ability to send messages in a two-way fashion and even included the ability to send and receive email. Many paging operators also support WCTP for sending and receiving messages from 1.5, 1.7 and two-way pagers. This is known as two-way paging.
Pager subscriptions have been on the decline since the widespread availability of mobile phones and their ability to send SMS based text messages which duplicates some pager functions. Many paging network operators now allow numeric and textual pages to be submitted to the paging networks via email. This is convenient for many users given the widespread adoption of email, but email-based message submission methods do not usually provide any means to ensure that messages have been received by the paging network. This can result in pager messages being delayed or lost. Older forms of message submission using the TAP protocol involve modem connections directly to a paging network, and are less subject to these delays. For this reason, older forms of message submission retain their usefulness for disseminating highly-important alerts to users such as emergency services personnel.
Pagers are still in use today in places where mobile phones typically cannot reach users. A good example is deep within a hospital complex where cellular coverage can be problematic. Pagers typically receive signals using the SCA subcarrier of FM broadcast stations in the 88-108 mhz band, which penetrates buildings more effectively than the 800 mhz or 1.8 ghz signals used by cellular phones. In most situations hospitals will contract out or purchase and maintain the equipment needed to provide this extra RF coverage. It is critical that quality signal reach all of the hospital campus areas so that its emergency staff can respond to patients' needs.
Pagers also have privacy advantages compared with cellular phones. Since a one-way pager is a passive receiver only (it sends no information back to the base station), its location or activity cannot be tracked.
Common paging protocols include: TAP, FLEX, ReFLEX, POCSAG, Golay and NTT. Past paging protocols include: Two-tone and 5/6-tone.
Pager technology is now being used in irrigation control systems and for traffic signals.
Pagers usually have very simple ring tones and some include a vibrating alert.
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