After the “bombing of Lebanon”… jobs are still using pagers

After mobile phones became the main communication device in the world, wireless communication devices called “badgerPager has largely become a thing of the past, especially as demand has declined, after peaking in the 1990s.

However, these small electronic devices are still a vital means of communication in some areas, such as healthcare and emergency services, due to their durability and long battery life.

A senior surgeon in one of Britain’s leading hospitals said: “This is the most expensive and most effective way of communicating with a large number of people in terms of sending messages that do not require responses. “

He said that doctors and nurses in the country’s National Health Authority use pagers widely.

“It’s used to tell people where to go, when and why,” he explained.

Pagers made headlines on Tuesday, when thousands of these devices used by members of the Hezbollah group were detonated simultaneously across Lebanon, killing 12 people and injuring nearly 3,000 others.

A senior security source in Lebanon and another source said that the Israeli intelligence service (Mossad) was the one who planted the explosives inside the devices.

The National Health Service in Great Britain was using around 130,000 pagers in 2019, a number that equaled more than 10% of pagers in the world, according to government data. More recent figures are not available as of this date.

Pages and emergency doctors

Doctors who work in hospital emergency departments carry these devices on duty.

A senior NHS doctor said that many walkie-talkies can also emit a siren, then broadcast a voice message to groups, thus alerting entire medical teams at the same time that there is an emergency, and not this is not possible using a mobile phone.

An informed source from the Royal National Rescue Boat Group explained to Reuters that the group uses pagers to alert its crews. The institution declined to comment.

Tracking is more difficult

Two sources familiar with Hezbollah’s operations told Reuters this year that the group’s members use pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an effort to avoid Israeli surveillance of their locations.

Recorders may be more difficult to trace than smartphones, as they receive messages transmitted via wireless signals, while cell phones send information to the network to find the nearest cell tower and stay connected, making them easier to find.

Pagers also lack modern navigation technologies such as Global Positioning System (GPS), which made them a popular choice among criminals, especially drug dealers in the United States, in the past.

But agencies are using mobile phones more these days, according to Ken Gray, a former FBI official, who told Reuters.

Gray said: “I don’t know if anyone uses them (pagers)… They’ve all moved to cell phones and prepaid phones,” which are easy to throw away and another phone with a different number replaced, making it difficult to find.

Gray, who spent 24 years in the FBI and now teaches criminal justice and homeland security at the University of New Haven, said criminals have changed with time and newer technology.

The size of the global pager market, which was once the main source of income for companies like Motorola, will reach $1.6 billion in 2023, according to a report published in April by Cognitive Market Research.

This represents a small part of the global smartphone market, which was estimated at half a trillion dollars by the end of 2023.