As mobile phones became the world's main communications tool, pagers, also known as beepers because of the sound they make to notify users about incoming messages, were largely rendered obsolete, with demand plunging from their 1990s heyday.
But the tiny electronic devices remain a vital means of communication in some areas - such as healthcare and emergency services - thanks to their durability and long battery life.
"It's the cheapest and most efficient way to communicate to a large number of people about messages that don't need responses," said a senior surgeon at a major UK hospital, adding that pagers are commonly used by doctors and nurses across the country's National Health Service (NHS). "It's used to tell people where to go, when, and what for."
Pagers grabbed headlines on Tuesday when thousands used by members of militant group Hezbollah were detonated simultaneously across Lebanon, killing at least nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others.
According to a senior Lebanese security source and another source, explosives inside the devices were planted by Israel's Mossad spy agency.
The UK's NHS was using around 130,000 pagers in 2019, more than one in 10 of the world's pagers, according to the government. More up-to-date figures were not available.
Doctors working in hospital emergency departments carry them when they are on call.
Many pagers can also send out a siren and then broadcast a voice message to groups so that whole medical teams are alerted simultaneously to an emergency, a senior doctor in the NHS said. That is not possible with a mobile phone.
Britain's Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) uses pagers to alert its crews, a source familiar with the lifeboat service told Reuters. The RNLI declined to comment.
PAGERS HARDER TO TRACK
Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking, two sources familiar with the group's operations told Reuters this year.
Pagers can be harder to track than smartphones because they receive messages transmitted via radio signal, while mobile phones send information to the network to find the nearest cellular tower and stay connected, allowing it easier to trace.
Pagers also lack more modern navigation technologies like the Global Positioning System, or GPS.
These have made them a popular choice among criminals, especially drug dealers in the United States, in the past.
But gangs are using mobile phones more these days, former FBI agent Ken Gray told Reuters.
"I don't know if anyone uses them (pagers)," he said.
"They all went to cell phones, burner phones" which can be easily disposed of and replaced with another phone with a different number, making them difficult to trace.
Gray, who served 24 years at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and now teaches criminal justice and homeland security at the University of New Haven, said that criminals changed with the times and newer technology.
The global pagers market, once a major source of revenue for companies like Motorola, amounted to $1.6 billion in 2023, according to an April report by Cognitive Market Research.
That amounts to a tiny fraction of the global smartphone market, which was estimated at around half a trillion U.S. dollars as of end-2023.
But demand for pagers is rising as a larger patient population creates more need for efficient communication in the healthcare sector, the report said, forecasting compound annual growth of 5.9% from 2023 to 2030.
It said North America and Europe are the two biggest pager markets, generating $528 million and $496 million in revenue respectively.
© Thomson Reuters 2024.
28 Comments
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Gorramcowboy
To answer the headline: Terrorists.
kurisupisu
When enemies live so closely to each other then privacy is an issue.
This is why pagers were being used.
Open-minded
They have no GPS like an old flip phone, and they can not be pinged by cellular towers.
It depends on country and location within that country. Alot of places require ID to purchase a burner or to get service. They are becoming harder to acquire on a regular basis!
Good spies or criminals would need to replace them every few days. That is a lot of logistics!
soudan
Really? This comes across as a very insensitive headline with the flippant use of "anyway". Might want to re-think it or at least delete "anyway". Come on JT - do better.
wallace
Burner phones in the future.
dagon
Past the politics and the murder of children Israel has opened a dangerous new arena of warfare.
What of weaponized LLM agents detonating smartphone batteries in a WMD attack or targeting certain groups based on their online presence?
AI researchers like Stuart Russell have already warned us as much.
https://thebulletin.org/2017/12/as-much-death-as-you-want-uc-berkeleys-stuart-russell-on-slaughterbots/
TakaIka
How is this a pertinent question when any kind of similar device could also be triggered to explode right next to innocent bystanders? There are terrorists on both sides of this conflict, and they should all be condemned as such without prevaricating over questions of supposed 'justification'. #WarCrimes
shogun36
I'll tell you exactly who still uses pa........
hold on,
I have a fax coming in from my landline.
Some dude
I have a fax coming in from my landline.
Curses! It's from the section chief telling me that I am in his bad books for clocking out of work at 10:56 last night while our "ace" was still there.
Blacklabel
Nobody NOW lol
tora
You didn't read the article. Unless you think doctors are terrorists (whatever that word means).
Cephus
"Who still uses pagers anyway?"
Good question, however, although pagers use outdated technologies. Could this be a start of new wave of cyber physical attacks? Where technologies be it cutting-edge or outdated becomes conveniently both a tool and a target.
rainyday
Setting aside the fact that the pagers in question were being used by Hezbollah, the fact that it was possible for someone to insert lethal bombs into thousands of them at some point in their production or distribution process without anyone noticing is probably going to be a point of concern for most potential consumers.
Cephus
"Setting aside the fact that the pagers in question were being used by Hezbollah, the fact that it was possible for someone to insert lethal bombs into thousands of them at some point in their production or distribution process without anyone noticing is probably going to be a point of concern for most potential consumers."@rainyday
We still don't know whether a lethal bomb was inserted at some point in their production or distribution. Or were the pagers battery used to blow them up everything we know is speculation. Which brings us to your point of concern for not only the consumer but even those in the same vicinity.
ian
Says the article
John-San
Well it back to smoke signals for my old mates Hezy
kohakuebisu
My impression too. Nice people do not belittle victims just because they possess something that may seem like old or inappropriate tech.
Children and random bystanders in supermarkets are not terrorists. They are victims.
There is plenty of old tech in Japan. I hope none of it is ever fitted with bombs.
Sven Asai
Pagers and walki-talkies are still widely sold and used, also in restaurants or on big construction sites, maybe also agriculture and so on. Potentially all devices can be manipulated, calculators, coffee machines, irons, desk or ceiling lamps, anything , of course including everyone's beloved smartphones too. I guess, we just have seen a new Pandora box opening era. And while very most of us are no terrorists or other haunted subjects, we all are affected and under threat from now on, because maybe not our devices and home appliances explode, but randomly a nearby one, in places with many people or while commuting etc. Take care, everyone, my guess is that these Lebanon incidents have given much inspiration, globally, to a lot of weird people with any open political, religious or even only private invoices or rage feelings.
asusa tabi
if israeli intelligence, motivated by the massacres of Oct-7, were able to do this to their terrorist enemies, i have no doubt that every single electronic device "made in china" has backdoors to china-gov, at least, and who knows what else.
Cephus
"if israeli intelligence, motivated by the massacres of Oct-7, were able to do this to their terrorist enemies, i have no doubt that every single electronic device "made in china" has backdoors to china-gov, at least, and who knows what else."@asusa tabi
Interesting, that's one way of viewing it.
Alfie Noakes
The headlines come with the articles, which in this case is from Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters is a longstanding funnel for British security service disinformation, misinformation and propaganda, hence the sneery tone and claims that only Hezbollah were using the pagers. The article is intended to dehumanize innocent victims of the attacks and reinforce the notion that only Hezbollah members were killed or hurt, which is entirely untrue.
The "two sources" mentioned here will be members of the security services, probably British, probably Mi6. Unnamed sources in wire-service reports like this usually are.
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-office-russian-media/
tamanegi
In Japan..
Doctors, nurses, the courier who came to my apartment last weekend, my salesman father in-law, the dude on the front desk at the gym I go to..there are lots of people wearing pagers here.
tora
What about made in America? Especially computer OSs such as OSX and Windows. Oh what Snowden has already given us proof.....
No wonder the Chinese and Russians etc are moving away from American closed source software.
Strangerland
No, there are no backdoors in macOS, and not intentionally in Windows. Encryption used by the the government and in personal computing are of the same level in America. The government actually tried to prevent this in the 80s or the 90s, there were court battles, and the people won the right to encryption. Apple in particular has had multiple court cases where the government has tried to force them to create backdoors, and Apple has said no, and fought successfully in court.
Snowden gave us proof that the government was snooping on phone calls. Not the same thing. In that case, the government was tapped into the infrastructure, not the devices.
theFu
I carried a pager 24/7/365 for a few years before cell phones were popular, but still available. Pagers worked inside buildings where cell phones either weren't allowed or didn't work. Some of those buildings were leaky Faraday cages. Some others didn't allow cameras, which is an issue for remaining in contact, but not being allowed to bring a cellular phone inside.
Pagers work where cellphones don't. They don't need as much bandwidth and don't need a good SNR for the allowed numeric data to be sent and received.
With a pager, swapping burner phones isn't an issue. Change phones 5x a day and it doesn't matter. The pager keeps the same number. Codes can be used with pagers as well. Where I worked, we had codes for commonly used things. Just needed the decoder sheet and a little knowledge to know what the code meant. Codes for the "building is burning down" to "Italian for lunch" to "come to location X ASAP" were part of our code. We were a mobile workforce, so codes were just pre-arranged messages before texting exited.
There are plenty of hacks for every OS, regardless of the marketing or social media claims. Including those from Apple. Often, the hacks are possible because of some human choice or human action. Good security is hard when humans have to be involved.
Phone networks use a control protocol called SS7 which is full of hacks that have been known and abused by intelligence agencies, countries, and telcos around the world for decades. Only in the last year has the US Congress told telcos to "fix it." The solution will either require a complete overhaul of telecommunications networking OR it will be putting lipstick on a pig. G4 and G5 wireless networks don't use SS7, but the control protocol they use have similar issues. Also, whenever a call leaves the purely wireless network, it is not on the normal phone network and using SS7. Older cell phones using G3 and earlier protocols could be tracked using SS7. The weaknesses aren't state secrets. They are well-known, but not widely publicized outside telcos and spy/intelligence organizations.
The Chinese have taken Linux and added tracing their their releases for all the Chinese people to be traced. This applies to computers, routers, and cellular devices. Of course, they want the world to try it as well, since having intelligence gathering mandated by the CCP state only helps them.
I can understand the fears in using US technology. It is extremely unlikely that any company would allow the USGovt to widely mandate deployment of any sort of USGovt tracking in their products, unless it was for a very, very, very, specific target. We've seen tech companies refuse to help the USGovt. Happens all the time and they fight in court. Usually, they win, but not always. There are also national security letters that the tech companies try to fight, but those are secret and not public wither they win or lose. Generally, the tech companies when only when the govt doesn't have specific targets. They are called fishing expeditions and more and more of them are being found to be illegal. A few weeks ago, google successfully won against the FBI for "area" search warrants where the area wasn't sufficiently small and they didn't know who they were trying to get. I've never heard of a single legal battle like that in Russia or China. Telling your authoritarian govt "no" makes you disappear in those places, it seems. Not in the US. Fighting the govt is just another legal thing with a good chance of winning if there is law being violated by the US or State Govt.
Desert Tortoise
It would not surprise me if the Israelis had a distributor in Lebanon and another in Syria who appeared to be legitimate businessmen with thousands of such phones to sell and equipped to allow Israeli intelligence to determine locations and listen to conversations.
Desert Tortoise
Anyone want to bet that BAC Consulting in Hungary is an Israeli front company? They got the rights to make pagers under the Apollo brand name from the Taiwanese parent firm. Israel has a well developed electronics industry. They probably manufactured them in Israel and sold them to Hezbollah through BAC Consulting. Hezbollah thinks they are getting around the Taiwanese by buying from Hungarian seller and never suspect they just bought explosive equipped pagers from their enemy.
theFu
The supplier of the actual phone/pager doesn't matter. It was just a tiny firmware change and a different battery that needed to be changed, later, after the manufacturing.
As for locating people using cell phones. That hasn't been hard ... er ... ever. Since the early 2000s, cell phones have had built-in GPS that can be enabled by the cell network operator. The radio chips have integrated GPS, FM, bluetooth and wifi all into the same, tiny, low-power, chip used for all phones for a long time.