I have been told this several times a year for at least the last 15 years. Yet paging stubbornly refuses to die. Why is this? Why is paging still the text messaging system of choice for the critical messaging requirements of emergency services and hospitals?
It’s simple really. There is no substitute.
Many thought, and still think, that cellular SMS would replace paging but cellular just cannot rival paging for its ability to have a message sent in 30 secs or less to literally thousands of people in a single transmission (millions if there were enough people out there carrying a pager), nor can it rival the battery life of a pager nor the reliability of the paging signal which provides significantly greater coverage in general than the cellular networks.
People have tried to simulate paging using apps on Smart Phones and using data rather than SMS however there is no getting away from the fact that cellphones have a single ID and so to get a single message to a thousand phones requires 1000 transmissions. The time taken to do that and the overhead it imposes on the cellular network means that it just isn’t fast enough or reliable enough to be used for critical messaging.
Yes an emergency message can be sent to every phone in an area using the facilities for mass alerting (cell broadcast) but there is little or no control over who this goes to, being geographically based rather than ID based. Additionally history has shown that in large scale emergency situations the first things to fail are the mobile networks generally due to overloading with private calls.
The other problems with cellular are the relatively short battery life, meaning there is a good chance the phone battery will be flat, and their usage, with often multiple apps operating at the same time meaning the message just gets lost in the general noise.
So paging is here to stay until some new technology comes along to replace both paging and current generation cellular networks and, despite the view of so called experts, is far from dead.