Paging Services
Motorola Corporation first introduced tone-only pagers in 1956. Tone-only pagers send a tone to a person's pager. People who are paged call a paging operator or an answering service to find out the telephone number and possibly why a person was trying to reach them. Physicians, plumbers and people who needed to be reached in emergencies were early users of tone-only pagers.
Pager sales boomed from the time they were introduced in 1956 until 1998, when growth slowed. When cellular telephone service was introduced in the late 1980s, many industry experts thought that this would be the death knell for paging because cellular is a two-way service. However, paging sales continued to grow strongly until competition in the cellular industry caused prices for cellular phones to drop. Not only did the prices of cellular phones drop but also paging capabilities were added to the phones. People found that they could carry one device capable of paging, short messaging and two-way telephoning. In 1997, for the first time, the number of cellular telephones exceeded the number of pagers in service.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, paging companies were merging and going into bankruptcy. The two largest paging companies in the United States are Arch Wireless, Inc. and Metrocall. Both are in shaky financial condition.
Paging vs. Wireless Telephone Service
Many customers, particularly business people, use their cellular phones for both paging and telephone calls. PCS and traditional digital cellular both support paging and short messaging services in the form of brief email messages to users with digital handsets. The gap between functionality in paging and cellular services has narrowed.
The difference in cost between paging and cellular service is narrowing as well. However, paging is still cheaper than cellular service; monthly fees range from $7 to $13 and often include usage. Moreover, pagers are easy to use, convenient and small. A pager fits on a person's belt. Another important advantage of pagers is the length of their battery life. Paging batteries, usually AA, often last for a month or two. PCS batteries last up to about two weeks on standby.
Two-Way Paging Using Narrowband PCS
Paging services utilize PCS spectrum for advanced features and product innovations such as two-way advanced messaging services. For example, two-way pagers allow users to receive pages and short messages and respond to pages with canned messages preprogrammed under buttons of a pager (e.g., “stuck in traffic”). Second generation two-way pagers incorporate keyboards and can be used to send and receive email. For example, to send a message to a pager, someone logs into the paging network's Internet site and sends a page using the recipient's PIN as part of the address. The reply can be sent to a variety of devices such as a cell phone, another pager or a standard email address. If it's sent to a cellular telephone without text messaging support, some services convert the message to synthesized voice. Motorola offers a pager that can receive email from corporate Microsoft Outlook email servers. Some carriers who purchased narrowband spectrum are using PCS frequencies to deliver Internet information such as stock quotes and sports scores.
Two-way paging uses two narrow slices of the PCS spectrum that the FCC started auctioning off in 1994. One channel is used for sending the page and the other for responding to pages. Paging companies are interested in narrowband paging, not only for its two-way capability, but also for its ability to provide additional capacity. Non-PCS pagers send pages using a technique called Simulcast. Simulcast sends each page through every tower in the paging carrier's network. This uses up capacity inefficiently. Narrowband PCS, on the other hand, sends each page only to the same place as the last transmission. This is correct in 90% of the pages.