Pager Level of service

The level of service provided by the paging carrier depends on the type of pager. The three types of pagers offered today are digital pagers, alphanumeric pagers, and two-way pagers. Some old-tone pagers are also still in use. Table 1 shows typical monthly pager rates:



Tone pagers


Tone pagers, or beepers, were initially used by people whose professions required them to be available at all hours, such as doctors. Tone pagers give off a tone only; they cannot send numeric messages. Tone pagers are definitely a telecom antiquity; it has been my experience that out of a hundred businesses, five or six still have tone pagers.

Save money on tone pagers
Ironically, tone pagers often cost more than digital pagers. During the past few years, competition has driven the cost of digital pagers down, but tone pagers are a small noncompetitive sector of the overall paging industry. Carriers and customers alike tend to ignore their tone pagers, and no one ever tries to negotiate lower pricing.

Replace tone pagers with digital pagers
Consider the following example: A West Texas oil drilling company used 20 tone pagers. When an employee out in the oilfield was paged, he knew it was time to return to the office. The system worked fine, and the company never felt the need to upgrade to numeric pagers. Since the 1970s, the company had been paying $15 per month for each pager. Eventually the company replaced the tone pagers with digital pagers for only $7 per unit. This change saved the company $160 per month.

Digital pagers


Digital pagers, also called numeric pagers, relay numeric digits to the user—normally, a phone number. Most pagers in service today are digital pagers. Digital pagers normally sell for $25 to $100, but carriers will often give the pager to a customer who signs a contract. Monthly service for a digital pager costs between $5 and $10.

Alphanumeric pagers


Alphanumeric pagers display numeric and text messages across a small LCD screen with up to nine lines. Many carriers broadcast news, weather, and stock quotes to the pager throughout the day. Alphanumeric pagers also come loaded with such features as distinct rings and vibrations, an alarm, message memory, calendar functions, and phone-number storage. They cost between $100 and $300 each. The expense for service is normally $10 to $20 per month.

Two-way pagers


Two-way pagers, such as Motorola’s Page Writer, provide traditional alphanumeric paging capability, but also give the user the ability to check e-mail, surf the internet, and read voice-mail messages that have been converted to text messages. Two-way pagers look like miniature laptop computers and even include a small keyboard. These pagers cost around $400, and service costs between $25 and $35 per month.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lots of environments still require paging. The most important aspect of this requirement is that the messages and pages being sent are of a critical nature, if not an outright emergency. The most important aspect of this fact is that more than 80% of the pagers in these situations NEVER leave a specific, physical environment. I refer to hospitals and manufacturing environments where a message delivery delayed by the "first in first out" limitations of a commercial paging network can mean the difference between timely and effective medical care and harm to a patient. In the case of factories, it is the difference between short downtime for repair and damage to expensive production equipment. It may be "old" technology but when onsite/in-house/private paging systems are combined with unified messaging and message management solutions in an IT networked infrastructure the savings on so many levels are realized. Time, equipment, safety, improved patient care, better ROI on existing technology investments, reduced risk/litigation exposure, etc. Commercial paging services still have a place in providing services, but their ability to deliver in critical, emergency and crisis event scenarios is limited. This is not just a statement by me, the AAPC president said as much late last week. Till later!

JohnJenin said...

Wonderful explanation and details given by you Norm Zapata. Appreciate it! :)

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