Pagers may be better than cell phones

There is an interesting article that touches on this as well -

How Reliable are Cell Phones -
http://www.ringtones-central.com/how...ell-phones.htm

Mike Shea

---

› See More: Pagers may be better than cell phones

Prilosec wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> Sorry, pagers are a dying technology. There is no advantage to them at all
> for me, and probably not for anyone else fairly soon.

UNLESS, once again, you're in a venue where communication is a must, and
talking on a cell phone is impossible.

Larry

> Considering there were two cellular call processing centers located at
> the WTC, several weeks doesn't surprise me a bit. If the paging system
> had been there, that system would've been offline too.
>
Since you seem to be knowledagble in this are, "dumb question" if I may.
On 9-11 I was just about on the GWB when the tragedy began. My cell phones
(Verizon and AT&T at the time) were pretty useless pretty quickly but my
Blackbery (957) from Earthlink (using Motient/Cingular) never stopped
working and allowed me to stay in touch with family. I had a similiar
experience last summer during the NYC blackouts.

Though I was happy to stay in touch, I was surprised. Does the Blackberry
work on differnt towers/transmitters than cellular? Also, I have
considered switching from my 957 to a phone type Blackbery but based on
the above experiences, I was concerned. Any thoughts?

Thanks, Scott

YMMV. I carry both pager and cell phone and have different experiences.
Answers below:

"Prilosec" <[email protected]> wrote:
> I had a pager and cell phone(s) for years. I dropped the pager a couple
> years ago for a few reasons:
> 1. I need a large coverage area (NE US) with no gaps. This precludes the
> satellite services, as there are HUGE gaps between cities. Cell phone is
> much, much better coverage for very wide areas or national.

I find the opposite is true in WA and OR. My pager reaches almost
everywhere, while my multi-band (TDMA & GSM/GPRS) cell phone has all kinds
of gaps -- especially in rural and semi-rural areas. Also have fewer
problems with pager in buildings, etc. However, your comments about
national service could well be true.


> 2. Pager technology has not evolved at all. Pager transmitter companies
> have discontinued producing equipment, and most pager operators are
> maintaining their old equipment or buying used equipment at auction. It is
a
> dying technology.

Pretty much true. However, I'd say it is a *stagnant* technology.


> 3. Missed pages were just plain missed. Missed cell calls route to
> voicemail which is delivered when I got back into coverage. True, there is
a
> pager service that does this, too, but it costs nearly as much as basic
cell
> service.

You can also get message storage &/or voicemail inexpensively. I pay less
than $15, including all of the BS taxes and surcharges. Even though a
(numeric or voice) page doesn't get through, it is stored in a
voicemail-like box. It doesn't keep notifying like a cell phone, but the
message isn't totally lost. Also, cell phone voicemail notifications aren't
perfect. I've had messages with no alert... and a persistent alert icon
with no messages in the box. And... pager notifications, in my experience,
are much more timely. I've had cell phone notifications and SMS's that are
significantly delayed.


> 4. My "superwide regional" pager coverage cost me about 12.00 a month
when
> I quit. Basic cell service for the same area costs about 25.00 a month.

You forgot that cell services tend to tack on much larger taxes and fees.
Here, you're probably looking at $14 & $32 for the same two packages.


> 5. Every single page still results in a cell phone call from my end to
> return the page. Waste of time.

Not always. Even with just numberic paging, you can use "pager shorthand"
to send messages regarding times or the relative importance of the message,
etc.


> 6. My cell phone is now about the same size as my beeper was. Battery
life
> is no longer an issue, either. My cell phone can vibrate like my beeper
did,
> etc..

Unless you have a teeny-tiny Barbie-sized cell phone like the ones in the
Will Farrell SNL skit, that isn't true. My Motorola pager is about the size
of a thick Zippo lighter. And it also takes *much* more abuse than a cell
phone would.


> ... There is no advantage to them at all for me...

For you and others, this could be very true. But everyone's needs and
experiences are different. For example, I don't need to play "trucker" with
Nextel PTT service -- "Breaker 1-9, Breaker 1-9... we got us a convoy!"

"Prilosec" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> I had a pager and cell phone(s) for years. I dropped the pager a couple
> years ago for a few reasons:
> 1. I need a large coverage area (NE US) with no gaps. This precludes the
> satellite services, as there are HUGE gaps between cities. Cell phone is
> much, much better coverage for very wide areas or national.

I operate in the same area and came to the same conclusion. From my
experience the "satellite" system always had the worst coverage because they
only had a few transmitters in each city.

> 2. Pager technology has not evolved at all. Pager transmitter companies
> have discontinued producing equipment, and most pager operators are
> maintaining their old equipment or buying used equipment at auction. It is
a
> dying technology.

That is pretty much what is going on here. Some of the systems are dead and
the ones that are up need to buy used equipment to keep going. Last time I
checked Motorola no longer made pagers and the largest pager system operator
(Metrocall) was still in bankruptcy. Someone I know who had a good regional
system ended up having to sell it cheap just to get out from under it
because he was down to less than 10% of his former customers. He wasn't
making enough to pay the bills.


> 3. Missed pages were just plain missed. Missed cell calls route to
> voicemail which is delivered when I got back into coverage. True, there is
a
> pager service that does this, too, but it costs nearly as much as basic
cell
> service.
> 4. My "superwide regional" pager coverage cost me about 12.00 a month
when
> I quit. Basic cell service for the same area costs about 25.00 a month.
> 5. Every single page still results in a cell phone call from my end to
> return the page. Waste of time.
> 6. My cell phone is now about the same size as my beeper was. Battery
life
> is no longer an issue, either. My cell phone can vibrate like my beeper
did,
> etc..
> Sorry, pagers are a dying technology. There is no advantage to them at all
> for me, and probably not for anyone else fairly soon.

"Mike Shea" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> There is an interesting article that touches on this as well -
>
> How Reliable are Cell Phones -
> http://www.ringtones-central.com/how...ell-phones.htm

Most of the time we use the TAP protocol as described in the article to send
alpha pages to our phones. VZW maintains a TAP interface with a toll free
number.

Let me guess... you have a vested stake in the pager industry, don't you?

PagerGuy wrote:

> Isn't this a dead technology?
>
>
> No, there are still advances being made in this technology! There are
> many advantages to using these devices and still 12 million users in
> North America!


I won't deny that paging technology is very useful. It's found a good
niche in telemetry applications, which has been its bread and butter for
a while now since the public at large has ditched paging for cell
phones. Is it as useful to the average person as a cell phone, however?
That's debatable, and I'd argue that in many cases, no. This is why
cellphones have long overtaken paging. the price point is right, and
the features are more useable.

>
> What are the advantages of Pagers?
>
>
> Here are the major advantages.
> It is less intrusive than telephones, you decide when and if you call
> somebody.

*shrug* I decide when and if I call someone with my cellphone too. I
guess people fail to realize that having a cellphone doesn't mean you
must answer every call. If intrusion is a problem, you look at the
caller id info and decide for yourself if you want to answer the phone
or not.

> Safer to be beeped while driving than to take a phone call.

How so? if I take my eyes off the road to see who's calling me on a
pager, then I've taken my eyes off the road and compromised everyone's
safety.

> Safer in environments such as hospitals and construction zones.

How? Explain how an RF device, especially the newer two-way pagers that
are out there, are any safer.

> Better penetration of buildings.

This has always been an illusion. A lack of signal strength indicators
does not mean that you've always got a good signal. it's simply harder
to discern whether you've actually got good coverage on a pager than it
is on a cell phone.

> News and email availability allow savvy users to "be a little online
> all the time."

Mobile web surfing on your cell phone, anyone?

> Much less expensive, can lower cellphone bill by screening through
> pager also.

This was the case back in, say, 1996, when cell phone minutes were
scarce and you actually got charged for things like LD. With bucket
minutes, if a person has a plan with more minutes than they ever use,
then the benefit they see having a pager around is zero in terms of
reduced costs. And even if someone is constantly going over their plan,
not answering the phone and observing CID info is just as good as a
pager in many respects.

> A lot of people carry both Cellphone and Pagers. Some people find that
> in their area they are not always in cellphone range and carry the
> pager as a backup.

Ah yes, I subscribed to that farcical notion too. Unfortunately, people
don't often tell you that they paged you and ask you if you got it...
they just assume you did and that you ignored them.

> Then, some people are tired of the cost of cellphones. Those plans
> where you are buying so many minutes a month are very expensive for
> those who never use the phone unless they need to call a tow truck.

....and a pager will allow you to call a tow truck, how? Besides,
there's pay-as-you-go services for people who don't use the cell phone
that often.

> The feature of "free voicemail" on cellphones is there just so you
> have to use airtime to listen to the message, then use more airtime to
> make a return call.

Actually, everyone knows that you can check your voicemail from a
landline and not get billed airtime. Which is what you'd be doing
anyway if you had a pager and no cell phone, or had a cell phone but
were THAT worried about wasting your minutes.


>
> Then, of course, the pager is often better at email and news then
> cellphones.

Really? Based on what? A one way pager requires me to rely on whatever
news source the paging carrier has contracted with, and I'm stuck with
small stale headlines that are a couple lines long per item (I know
because I used to subscribe to this back in the day). With a cell
phone, I can choose my news source, and get a completed story at will.

> How can I make people send me text pages?
>
>
> Your email program should have a function to set a "reply-to address."
> This address when set, makes an answer to your email go to that
> address regardless of the address in the "from." Field.

Ohh lovely, spam on my pager. Tell me, what happens when someone goes
over their monthly character limit? That's right, overage charges...
Now, how is that any different from someone going over their monthly
airtime limit?

You address that problem rather poorly here:

> If I toss my email address around the web, won't I get spammed on my
> pager, and charged for that message from my pager company?
>
>
> It's a risk.

Gee, thanks. At least with a cell phone, I can choose not to answer.
With spam on a pager, i've received the message whether i wanted to or
not. Nothing I can do about that once it's happened.


--
E-mail fudged to thwart spammers.
Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply.

In alt.cellular.sprintpcs Isaiah Beard <[email protected]> wrote:

> How? Explain how an RF device, especially the newer two-way pagers that
> are out there, are any safer.

I'll take this one.

All two-way pagers can be set to "hospital-friendly" one-way, receive-only
mode. You won't be able to make use of stuff like the Motorola ReFlex
technology found in a lot of two-way units, though - with ReFlex, if you're
out of coverage or the pager's off, the pages are held for a few days until
the network can find you again. In one-way mode, if you miss a page, it's
gone forever. In this respect, cell phones and two-way units win over one-
way -- usually the cellular network will continue to try to deliver your page
until it can be delivered.

Hospitals don't have issues with receive-only pagers.

You can't turn a phone's transmitter off.

> Mobile web surfing on your cell phone, anyone?

A great deal with other carriers like Sprint that allow unlimited 1x
web browsing (they charge $15 per month for the privilege, but the airtime
used doesn't count against your monthly voice allotment). Not a bad deal
with Verizon NationalAccess either if you have the package that only uses
airtime but you still must watch your usage carefully - or pay a lot more
than $15/month for flat-rate usage.

>> The feature of "free voicemail" on cellphones is there just so you
>> have to use airtime to listen to the message, then use more airtime to
>> make a return call.
>
> Actually, everyone knows that you can check your voicemail from a
> landline and not get billed airtime.

....if you have a Verizon phone, but. I'm not sure if that's true for everyone.
I did just confirm that you don't get billed airtime on a Sprint phone if
checking from a landline, but I don't know about other carriers (I have
active accounts only with Verizon and Sprint).

Maybe a couple Cingular or ATT customers could chime in here and enlighten
me

>> Then, of course, the pager is often better at email and news then
>> cellphones.
>
> Really? Based on what? A one way pager requires me to rely on whatever
> news source the paging carrier has contracted with, and I'm stuck with
> small stale headlines that are a couple lines long per item (I know
> because I used to subscribe to this back in the day). With a cell
> phone, I can choose my news source, and get a completed story at will.

SMS is limited to 160 characters. My Motorola Timeport P900 and my
PageWriter 2000 before that (both two-way alpha pagers) could hold 500
characters per message, with messages longer than 500 characters broken up
into chunks of 500 characters each.

> Gee, thanks. At least with a cell phone, I can choose not to answer.
> With spam on a pager, i've received the message whether i wanted to or
> not. Nothing I can do about that once it's happened.

Uhhh... same with SMS spam to a cell phone.


--
JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, Apple Valley, CA PGP: 0xE3AE35ED
Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / [email protected]
Domain Names, $9.95/yr, 24x7 service: http://DomainNames.JustThe.net/
"someone once called me a sofa, but i didn't feel compelled to rush out and buy
slip covers." -adam brower * Hiroshima '45, Chernobyl '86, Windows 98/2000/2003

In article <[email protected]>,=20
[email protected]lid says...
>=20
> "Mike Shea" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
> > There is an interesting article that touches on this as well -
> >
> > How Reliable are Cell Phones -
> > http://www.ringtones-central.com/how...ell-phones.htm
>=20
> Most of the time we use the TAP protocol as described in the article to s=
end
> alpha pages to our phones. VZW maintains a TAP interface with a toll free
> number.
>=20
>=20
>=20

So does SPCS.

--=20
R=D8=DF
O/Siris
I work for Sprint PCS
I *don't* speak for them

Isaiah Beard wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> This has always been an illusion. A lack of signal strength indicators
> does not mean that you've always got a good signal. it's simply harder
> to discern whether you've actually got good coverage on a pager than it
> is on a cell phone.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

It's more of a binary (on/off) phenonenon, rather that incremental.

My pager (a 2-way Motorola PF 1500) displays "Receiving Messages" when it's
out of transmitting range, and "Storing Messages" when it's completely out
of range.

And, while not scientifically proven, at least by me, my pager *does* seem
to have better coverage than cell phones.

I'm frequently in lead-lined, or highly shielded, areas, where *no one's"
cell phone gets a signal, yet I'm able to send/receive paging messages.

Larry

Lawrence Glasser wrote:
>
> Isaiah Beard wrote:
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > This has always been an illusion. A lack of signal strength indicators
> > does not mean that you've always got a good signal. it's simply harder
> > to discern whether you've actually got good coverage on a pager than it
> > is on a cell phone.
>
> Maybe yes, maybe no.
>
> It's more of a binary (on/off) phenonenon, rather that incremental.
>
> My pager (a 2-way Motorola PF 1500) displays "Receiving Messages" when it's
> out of transmitting range, and "Storing Messages" when it's completely out
> of range.
>
> And, while not scientifically proven, at least by me, my pager *does* seem
> to have better coverage than cell phones.
>
> I'm frequently in lead-lined, or highly shielded, areas, where *no one's"
> cell phone gets a signal, yet I'm able to send/receive paging messages.
>
> Larry

Uh, that would be "phenoMenon."

I must use my *****-checker. I must use my *****-checker.

Larry

In alt.cellular.sprintpcs O/Siris <0siris@spr?ntpcs.com> wrote:

> So does SPCS.

Would you happen to have the TAP number? VZW's is archived on Google somewhere
in the VZW newsgroup. We should do the same with the Sprint number.

On another note...

Verizon Wireless has an amazingly useful service called Office Message
Alert which allows an automated system like an office voicemail system to
easily send a numeric page to a VZW phone. You dial the OMA toll-free number
and then send the ten-digit area code plus phone number of the phone you
are paging, followed immediately by a ten-digit numeric message (usually
this would be something like the office's main phone number, so the person
carrying the phone knows to call in). Then you just hang up, and the message
is sent to the phone over the cellular network's paging channel.

If SPCS had something like this it would be quite beneficial, especially to
business customers. I have OMA on my phone as a no-extra-cost option. I have
to be in digital coverage and on Verizon's network to guarantee I receive
the message, but that's to be expected anyhow... Does Sprint have a similar
service?




--
JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, Apple Valley, CA PGP: 0xE3AE35ED
Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / [email protected]
Domain Names, $9.95/yr, 24x7 service: http://DomainNames.JustThe.net/
"someone once called me a sofa, but i didn't feel compelled to rush out and buy
slip covers." -adam brower * Hiroshima '45, Chernobyl '86, Windows 98/2000/2003

"Robert M" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> In article <[email protected]>,
> Lawrence Glasser <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Mainly because cell phones have more dead spots than pagers!
>
That depends on the animal. 2-way pagers have plenty of dead spots,
including inside buildings where my cell phone has no problem.

One way pagers are useless, since they don't offer store-and-forward
service. How do you know when you're out of area?

"Mark E. Daniel" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> In alt.cellular DevilsPGD <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Which is weird since cell phones typically have voicemail, and will hold
> > SMS and voicemail messages until the cellphone comes back, whereas with
> > a pager, the page is completely lost if it occurs when the pager is out
> > of range.
>
> Unless you use a pager that has ReFlex service. It's a ping-pong type
> deal...Of course it costs more then your standard pager and service, but
> you will receive your pages when you get in coverage. When I used to
> have a pager I went with Reflex from two different companies. I ened up
> with Metrocall when I turned off the pager and my landline phone and
> went completely wireless in 2001.

The down side of ReFlex is when you're in a fringe area. You'll get that
page, but if the tower doesn't receive an ACK from your pager, you're going
to keep getting that page. Again and again.

> Works fine but I'd like to see the cellular carriers offer a seperate
> phone number that goes straight to the numeric paging prompt. It could
> be another $4/month charge for them.
>
> --
> Jud
> Dallas TX USA

Verizon already does. Works great!