Does a Blackberry make a good pager?

July 12, 2006 9:48 AM

Does anyone out there use a Blackberry successfully as a pager?

I do Operations/Sysadmin work, and currently carry a pager -- Yeah, the old-skool kind. I've tried to use my cell phone as my pager (our paging system sends emails, so I can switch back and forth by just changing the email addy), but the problem with that is three-fold:

First, cell coverage isn't as comprehensive as pager coverage, as a result I'll be in 'dead spots' without knowing it, delaying message delivery. Second, SMS's are only *usually*, but not always, delivered immediately -- I've gotten messages up to an hour or two after their sent, whereas pages, even sent as emails, arrive instantly every time. And third, phones aren't meant to be nagging devices, I have yet to have a phone that, when you receive an SMS, will do something like beep regularly every 30s (like my pager does) until I acknowledge the message.

A Blackberry seems like a good solution, and my company's willing to pick up the tab for one (allowing me to collapse my phone + pager into one device) only I'm having a hard time figuring out how well it handles paging. I know you can send pages to a Blackberry (separate from emails, etc.), but are they just SMSs? Is the coverage as good (or as bad) as cell phones or pagers? Is the data service more or less reliable than, say, SMSs or paging (since I could just get the emails sent to it directly) Anyone using them like this?

posted by wolftrouble to computers & internet (10 comments total)

The old Blackberries ran on pager network or Mobitex but the new ones are all basically GSM phones with a keyboard. So they'll get the same coverage as a GSM phone would.
posted by GuyZero at 10:08 AM on July 12, 2006

You can send "PIN messages" to a Blackberry, which travel over the Blackberry side of the network, but I'm not sure if you can originate those messages from anything other than another Blackberry.

Check out BlackBerryForums.com (if you can stand the stupidity) for people with a better answer on this.
posted by baylink at 10:15 AM on July 12, 2006

Same coverage drawbacks as a phone. Email delivery will be instant when you have coverage, and will cache messages until you have coverage again if you're not reachable.

The caveat is your entire network infrastructure must be up and running -- Blackberry Server, Mail Server, Internal Network, Internet connection. If any one of these links in the chain goes down, you won't receive anything. Since you're in IT, I'm assuming you'll want to be paged if one or all of the above fail.

As far as sending page to the Blackberry, yeah it's just an SMS. I've never seen delays on those, but that would depend on your carrier.

You can set up the Blackberry to show a constant reminder when you have new messages. Mine flashes a red light if I have unread messages, for instance.
posted by Eddie Mars at 10:45 AM on July 12, 2006

Hmm, taking a second look, it seems like you don't have a Blackberry server in your environment. If this is the case, you'll be running off of your cell phone companies servers. They'll give you an email address to use, and generally you can also configure their system to check external mail account via POP3.

In this scenario, losing a server or network at your own company won't affect mail delivery. This would make it a much better fit.

FYI: If you run Lotus Domino for your mail, you can get a free copy of Blackberry server with 10 client licenses from Blackberry. It's the full server, but you only get support for 1 month.
posted by Eddie Mars at 10:51 AM on July 12, 2006

We use blackberrys in our operations shop. We get all our emails pushed to the blackberry and then set up rules using blackberry desktop manager to escalate important messages to level1. Then on the blackberry, level1 messages are set to vibrate and ring (different ring than phone).
posted by ngn01 at 11:17 AM on July 12, 2006

FYI: If you run Lotus Domino for your mail, you can get a free copy of Blackberry server with 10 client licenses from Blackberry. It's the full server, but you only get support for 1 month.

This is also true if you have Microsoft Exchange. I was a bit flabbergasted (having purchased BES in the last few years for my office) at this, and I had to call RIM to make sure. Sure enough, that's the offer.

To the point of the question: Yes, you have to depend on coverage, but the latest and greatest phones operate on all available cell frequencies, so you'll be hard pressed to find an area without coverage. The only times I really have trouble are when I'm deep in the bowels of a large building (like my son's school, for example). Even there, I can still pick up a GSM signal by standing in the right spot.

Additionally, the new phone I'm getting from T-Mobile has enough configuration options for notification that I'll be able to download all of my favorite nerd-porn mp3s as ring-tones (Homer Simpson quotes, Stewie quotes, themesongs from South Park, etc). You know what I mean...
posted by thanotopsis at 11:29 AM on July 12, 2006

@thano: yeah, but that notifier subsystem isn't as flexible as you think. At least on my 7100, there's no knob on the profiles that says "override custom ring tones", so anyone with a custom ringtone will get that even if you're in a profile for Loud or Quiet, with the respective annoyances.
posted by baylink at 11:54 AM on July 12, 2006

To answer some of the implied/explicit questions:

We're a very small shop; we'd be relying on our ISP for email/paging/etc. So no server locally. We're already doing this, in that our alert system generates emails, that go to either a pager or a cellular provider's email server, which then gets translated into pages/SMSs.

Eddie Mars: Are you sure Blackberry pages are just SMSs? I read a couple of blurbs about the products that seems to imply you can't reply to pages; if it was just SMSs, why would they restrict that?

Finally, we're in the bay area (CA). It doesn't matter how modern your phone is, cellular service coverage on any provider is, in my experience, roughly equivalent to swiss cheese. Holes, holes, holes.
posted by wolftrouble at 1:58 PM on July 12, 2006

Blackberry offers basic paging service in addition to standard service. I don't know if or how it applies to devices beyond the older, non-phone devices; that's a question for RIM or your provider.
posted by lhauser at 10:22 PM on July 12, 2006

If you can't use SMS to your phone because of coverage issues, you won't be able to use SMS to your BlackBerry any better since the BlackBerry is a phone.

Stick with your pager. Make your company pick up your cell phone costs on top of it. I'm sure your pager is probably $10/mo. Don't worry about it.
posted by jeversol at 3:59 PM on July 14, 2006