1990s India was a period of major change and the pager was one of the key technological changes that hit India at the time. It became the status symbol for the mobile professional.
History of pager
This was invented by Al Gross in 1949. The first systems were used in the 1950s and 1960s in USA and UK hospitals. When the wide-area paging networks were built in the 1980s, it became a part of the mainstream population. This peaked in the 1990s before the mobile phones became affordable.
In India, the pager came into the market in 1995. Here, it was considered to be a status symbol unlike in the West, where it was a utilitarian tool. Very often, it would be clipped to belts, showing that the wearer was an important, and busy person and needed to be reachable.
Technology
Pagers were operating on a one-way radio communication system. It was like a small FM radio receiver continuously tuned to a particular frequency. Every pager had a unique identification code. When the central transmitter broadcast a message tagged with that specific code, only the targeted pager would intercept it, triggering a beep, vibration, and a message display.
There were different types of pagers: One-way, two-way, numeric, alpha numeric etc.
One-way pagers allowed the users to receive messages but did not allow the user to respond. Two-way pagers had a small keyboard for typing replies. They could send and receive messages.
The pagers would beep on receiving the message and the user could read the message on a small LCD screen.
Are pagers still in use?
In certain sectors, they are still highly valued, though mainstream usage is very limited. It is said that The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and hospitals in North America still use pagers for doctors and nurses. First responders use them since radio signals penetrate through thick hospital walls and cover rural areas better than cellular networks. Many restaurants still use localised buzzer pagers to alert customers when their table is ready,
Manufacturers and Operators in India
Motorola was the main manufacturer controlling almost 80% of the market at the time. Casio and BPL were some of the other manufacturers. Paging networks were operated by DSS Mobile, BPL Connect and Pagelink among others. Most of the manufacturers converted to mobile phones when that became the norm in India.
The subscriber base in India had touched 20 lakh in 1998 before it started declining. By 2002, the services were completely stopped across the country.
Conclusion
In India, it may have ceased to exist long time back, but this was a link between the landline and the mobile phone. In the late 1990s, cell phone was introduced in India and as it developed with its incoming calls becoming free and the SMS text messaging, pagers became redundant.
Looking back at the pager and its evolution to exit, the speed with which this happened tells us a few things. It was an indicator of the general happenings in the country from that time. Even today, we see the speed of evolution of different items around us. It is probably a higher speed and degree of change than ever before. But we must remember to look back and think that not all shifts are bad or unnecessary.
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