Are pagers becoming obsolete? 2

[HVACAnswering]

I am the co-owner of an answering service that only works with companies within the HVAC/R industry. I have noticed that fewer and fewer of my clients use alpha-pagers and those that once used them have switched to nextel. I was curious of any professionalsstill rely on pagers? Thanks for your input.

 

[pablo02]

Our application was slightly different, and it too may evolve to text messaging, etc...

when I worked at an electric utility (and I take some credit for initiating this -- I introduced our IT guy to the idea), we had a computer dial up specific pagers and advise our plant management (and officers) when units came on-line, off-line, and some had them paged if a significant load change occurred -- this then developed into a notification of the environmental guys whenever a CEM (continuous emission monitoring) went into alarm...

to the best of my knowledge, they are still using these pagers (and many don't want to give out their cell phone numbers, or be paged via cell phone)

I am not up on the technology developments, but if your business has a dependency on the use of pagers, maybe there is a potential for serving your HVAC/R customers by supplying a paging service of critical customers .... (and I do not know the market either) --

 

[IRstuff]

I think, in general, that pagers have limited utility at this time. I turned off my pager about a year ago, when I got a cell phone.

The big issue is why one would want to carry around a pager, a phone and a PDA, if price was not a concern. Although, as more functions are combined, I would be concerned about a single failure taking out multiple systems, which could be REALLY annoying.

Most of the mahogany row guys at work carry Blackberry's that are tied directly to email, which allows them to get email as well as getting pages via email.



TTFN

 

[HVACAnswering]

Against the popular opinion of some companies I service, I still appreciate the simplistic beauty of the alpha pager.

I'm not arguing that pagers are more effective then cell phones, because they most certinly are not, but in certain places where cell phone signals are dead, pager signals carrying valuable information still get through.

We still offer alpha paging services to customers and I see no need to do away with it until cell phone technology improves. Thanks for everyones input so far.

 

[IRstuff]

Well, best of luck to you...

I can only say that the universe is conspiring against you.

My phone can only handle two numbers per name, which means office+cell, leaving no place for a pager, which would require a duplicate name entry, ugh..

TTFN

 

[HVACAnswering]

I guess you could say I love the old technology while still embracing new technology. Again, I still love to hear what the professionals think so I can tailor my company to the needs of the industry. Thanks guys.

 

[KenRad]

Our building automation system uses a software that pages the on-call Technician and Engineer on selected critical alarms. The pages come through very reliably, even in areas of the factory (or areas 5 miles down the road) where you cannot get a signal from any of the cell companies.

As much as we would like to consolidate what we carry on our belts, we've determined that it's best to keep our pagers, at least for now.

---KenRad