In the 1990s, before the widespread use of cellphones, pagers were the main way to reach people with urgent messages.
But pagers, which relay short messages over radio frequencies, quickly became less useful as mobile phones got smaller and more versatile. For the most part, the advent of do-everything smartphones made them obsolete.
The deadly attack in Lebanon on Tuesday targeting pagers carried by members of Hezbollah, which had been using the devices for years to make it harder for messages to be intercepted, has highlighted their low-tech features.
In some cases, pagers, also known as beepers, are considered more reliable than phones because they use radio frequencies that continue to work even if cellular networks are overwhelmed or Wi-Fi is unavailable.
Pagers can also be harder to track than smartphones because they lack more modern navigation technologies like the Global Positioning System, or GPS.
The pagers that exploded bore the name Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese company. Gold Apollo denied on Wednesday that it had made the pagers, saying another manufacturer had done so under a license. The pagers had been implanted with explosive material by Israel before they reached Lebanon, American and other officials told The New York Times.
According to a promotional video, the pager model, that Gold Apollo said was targeted in the attacks, AR924, is waterproof and offers 85 days of battery life on a charge.
Pagers are still widely used in U.S. hospitals for staff to receive important messages. Companies that sell paging systems to hospitals note how pager radio signals penetrate steel and concrete when cellular signals or Wi-Fi may not.
The size of the global pager market was $1.6 billion in 2023, according to Cognitive Market Research, an industry data analysis firm. There are dozens of manufacturers in Taiwan and China that make different varieties of pagers.
Most of the prominent pager brands of the 1990s, such as Motorola, stopped producing the devices and large mobile carriers discontinued pager services many years ago. Pager networks are also used on a smaller scale. For example, the discs that many restaurants and coffee shops hand to waiting customers to alert them that their order or table is ready use pager technology.
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