this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
111 points (84.5% liked)
Technology
59696 readers
2743 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't know why people still using pagers this day. Smartphones exist to replace that, even if you afraid to use smartphones because NSA/FBI/CIA/KGB tracking you could use dumb phone tho....
Even dumb phone can achieve so many things compared to pager
To add to your point regarding additional functions inherent in smartphones: pagers do one thing. They're relatively simple devices. Simplicity means that there are fewer things that can cause the device to function incorrectly or fail to function altogether. In hospital communications use-cases, this is a huge benefit.
Additionally, pagers are relatively inexpensive. Therefore, it's much more effective to have multiple spares available for distribution compared to smartphones. If a pager is inoperable, it can quickly be swapped out with a backup while the original is repaired or replaced. Smartphones do not carry that benefit.
It's because they are simpler devices which are much less infrastructure dependent, and also less power hungry. A single battery charge in a pager will last you much longer than a single battery charge on a smartphone.
Also due to their lower infrastructure requirements they can function even if cellular networks are not functioning, at all or optimally.
When I worked for a cell company, our on-call technicians carried a pager that was on a different company's network.
What networks do they use then?