Waitresses wear them so they’ll know when food orders are ready. Department store salespeople use them to better serve shoppers. Busy moms and dads swear by them to keep track of their teenagers.
What are they? They’re pagers, and they’re not just for business people anymore.
“They’ve been around since the 1940s, and they’ve always been an excellent business tool,” said Dorothy Salmon, paging analyst for MTA-EMCI, a Washington, D.C., telecommunications consulting firm. “But in order to increase their market, carriers and manufacturers (of pagers) have had to find new consumers. For the last five to seven years, they’ve been branching out and targeting the consumer market.y”
And how. According to paging industry analysts, there were about 40 million paging users in the United States at the end of 1996–a 22 percent hike over late 1995, said Salmon. And the number of pager users is expected to reach 57 million before the surge begins to level off around the year 2000, according to figures supplied by the Personal Communications Industry Association (PCIA) in Washington, D.C.
Along with the surge in consumer paging has come an ever-widening array of options to consider when purchasing or leasing a pager.
One of the most fundamental considerations is whether you’ll be satisfied with traditional numeric pagers or better off with the newer and increasingly popular alphanumeric models. The latter, which offer text as well as the traditional number messages–affording the chance to obtain headline news, sports scores and stock quotes–now represent about 10 percent of the market.
The alphanumeric pagers are an example of the increasing functionality manufacturers are offering to consumers, said Salmon. “When using an alpha pager, the person placing the page calls the number, speaks to an operator, gives a (personal identification) number and leaves a message like `Running late, meet you at the restaurant later.’ That message will be relayed to the person being paged, who can save or delete the message from the pager.”
Salmon suggests that if a customer only needs a pager to be notified of when to call home, a numeric pager is fine. But if you plan on using the product for personal and business paging needs, an alphanumeric pager may be a better long-term bet.
Storage capability of pagers is another consideration, said Ann E. Lynch, paging industry analyst with the Yankee Group, a Boston market research and consulting firm. Before puchasing or leasing, customers should ask how many messages the pager can store. “You don’t want a pager that can store 10 messages if you’ll be getting 20 messages a day,” she noted.
Battery life is one more quality to weigh. For the most part, pagers take either AA or AAA batteries. “You can get a POCSAG pager that has a battery life of about 30 days,” said Lynch. “But a FLEX pager has a battery life of about three months. Eventually, most pagers sold will be the FLEX models.”
She also advises customers to carefully compare the screens on different pager models. Some, she said, are considerably easier to read than others.
At least as important as the pager itself is the choice of the service plan, Lynch added. “Ask about the cost of coverage,” she said. “It will differ whether you want local, regional or national coverage. The prices of coverage will depend on the carrier.”
The decision to take local, regional or national coverage will hinge, of course, on how mobile you are. People who need pagers only for personal use don’t normally require anything broader than local coverage, Lynch said. Business travelers often choose regional or nationwide coveragel.
In choosing a service plan, customers should also ask how the carrier defines local or regional coverage, because those definitions can vary enormously from one service provider to the next.
The number of pages included in the plan per month is another consideration, reported Monica Allevan, senior editor of Wireless Week, a publication of Denver’s Chilton Communications. She said plans frequently offer 50, 100 or 150 pages a month for a set fee, with an additional charge for each call to the pager beyond the maximum number.
A greater number of calls per month may be allowed if customers commit to the service plan for an extended period of time. “Increasingly, service providers are requiring customers to sign a service agreement for six months or a year,” said Allevan. “(The plans) differ so much that you almost have to call each carrier and ask what they offer.”
Voice-mail service plans are also worth considering, said Phil Lombardo, general manager of Becker Beepers, a division of Boston-based Arch Communications, with three Chicago-area locations. All major carriers offer voice mail, which allows a voice message to be left by someone trying to reach the person with the pager. As soon as the message is recorded, the pager carrier’s own pager number appears on the pager, and the number is called to retrieve the voice message.
In addition, it’s possible to obtain a toll-free number for your pager. “I may want an 800 number on my pager if I’m travelling throughout the state, or to make it easier for out-of-state customers to reach me,” said Lombardo. “You can attach an 800 number to local, statewide, regional or national service plans.”
Prices are very competitive in the Chicago area and don’t vary widely from one carrier to another, said Lombardo.
The purchase price for a new numeric pager ranges from $65 to $125, while alphanumeric pagers can be had for $125 to $199, he said. You can lease a numeric pager from most Chicago-area carriers for $11 to $13 a month and an alphanumeric pager for $16 to $18 monthly. The lease prices include the cost of service plans for local service. Voice-mail capability will generally run about $5 to $10 per month extra.
Some experts suggested that there are compelling reasons for leasing a pager over buying one. “Leasing allows you the option of buying insurance to cover the loss of the pager,” said Allevan. “It’s a nominal fee, but it may be worth it because it’s so easy to lose a pager.”
Another reason to lease is the prospect of exciting new pager capabilities in the near future. For instance, pagers that permit two-way messaging are just over the horizon.
“We’ll be seeing these become commercially available in late 1997 and early 1998,” said Salmon.
