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they never quite made it into the pantheon of excellent sitcom plot devices like answering machines
Huh. I never thought about it before, but the times I can remember pagers being a significant plot points in sitcoms is when they were already on the way out. Dennis Duffy’s pager business on 30 Rock for example.
They use pagers all the time in Scrubs, since hospitals were one of the last places were pagers were still useful.
No idea if this can be secure in any reasonable way, but one way communication based on cheap devices and available frequencies could be quite attractive for activist mass mobilizations, or disaster
releaseerelief 🤔edit: don’t english before your first coffee
Pagers are still fairly popular for hospital workers because (among other things) they are cheap, minimally distracting, and not that useful if stolen. And they are still very popular among people who have to work in secure areas or on airgapped machines because it is (effectively) one way communication.
But for the vast majority of people? SMS provides all the same benefits (I mean, pagers are basically just one way SMS boxes) and emergency alert systems already exist.
Pagers also work even in parts of the hospital that cell phones don’t for whatever reason. At least last time I had a hospital pager a few years ago. Now a lot of places use commercial solutions like vocera that also work everywhere and allow two way voice comms.
Pager transmitters can be fairly high powered since it’s one way. One transmitter can cover a very large area if the antenna is up high.
How does a one way transmitter (transceivers are 2 way) ensure the message is received? Does the sender just have to hope the recipient is in range at the time of sending?
With one way pagers, there is no way to ensure the message is received. The transmitters can be hundreds of watts and the signal is narrow band and uses forward error correction. As long as the pager is on and in the coverage area, there is a pretty good chance the message will get through. The signals will penetrate much deeper into buildings than cell signals. Of course if you are underground or in a shielded room the signal will not get through and you will not know that you missed a message.
