Pagers: Are they all awful? Also, is there some other inter-office paging solution?

September 18, 2012 8:35 AM

Pagers: Are they all awful? Also, is there some other inter-office paging solution?

At work, we need to be able to summon someone to the front desk on short notice from about a 3 block radius.

The intercom doesn't reach all portions of the building.

Several of the people to be paged do not carry cell phones.

We have used a pager for years, but they die every 6 months or so.

Is this the fate of pagers, or are we getting awful ones? Any recommendations for a cheap, good pager?

Alternatively, any ideas how to solve this problem cheaply and efficiently?

posted by elmonobonobo to Work & Money (10 answers total)

How about walkie talkies? There's no service plan associated with them and they're more easily replaced as you can just have a slew of them tuned to the same channel.
posted by inturnaround at 8:42 AM on September 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

Walkie talkies would seem to be the obvious answer. I've used them in several different settings where staff on large properties needed to communicate with each other regularly.

The point of pagers is to contact someone anywhere. You page them, they call you back, pretty much anywhere in the country. But if you're staying within a mile or two--or ten, with modern hardware--there's really no reason not to use walkie talkies I can see. Instant two-way communication, no ongoing service plans, and you can just leave 'em charging when they're not in use. They run like $40-100 a pair at Radio Shack. That's less than you'll pay for a single pager, and you'd still need to pay for the service plan.
posted by valkyryn at 8:47 AM on September 18, 2012

Yes, walkie talkies are the answer.
posted by DoubleLune at 8:56 AM on September 18, 2012

Walkie talkies definitely seem like the logical choice. If, for some reason, this isn't an option, then perhaps a cheap cell phone (not a smartphone, just a super basic phone) might be better than a pager given the reliability issues that you have with pagers.
posted by asnider at 9:01 AM on September 18, 2012

At my workplace, we use a cheap cell phone for this. Whoever's on call carries the cell phone.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 9:02 AM on September 18, 2012

If this is for business, you really shouldn't be using FRS/GMRS walkie talkies; any member of the public can hear what you're sayingm and can cut in on pages (or impersonate them). You should be looking at (licensed) commercial band kit - expensive, but built like tanks.

Or, y'know, cheap tough cellphone ...
posted by scruss at 9:23 AM on September 18, 2012

Pagers can definitely live longer than 6 months. I carried the same pager through 4 years of med school and residency. I kicked the shit out of the thing, but it still had the ability to wake me up with its awful ringtone in the middle of the night. I think it was a Motorola brand, but I'm not completely sure. Of course, this was just a numeric pager as my training hospital was stuck in the 1990s for 20 years.

Are you sure your employees aren't intentionally destroying their pagers somehow? Because that's something I dreamed about.
posted by flying kumquat at 9:58 AM on September 18, 2012

My work pager has lasted several years with no problem. It's a SunTelecom T3 Plus.

Give users with cell phones the option of just getting a SMS instead of having to carry a pager.
posted by wongcorgi at 10:21 AM on September 18, 2012

I have to carry a pager every few weeks. They suck harder than deep space, fragile, incomprehensible, and worse coverage than a cell. I manage to damage mine regularly, but they keep getting new ones to my extreme annoyance. Why am I carrying a phone and pager? At least it's not a phone, a blackberry and a pager anymore.

Walkie-talkies are great, though they have deadspots too.

Issue a no-contract cell with SMS capability to everyone (or pass one around as a duty phone). They're about the same price a pager, can be smaller than a pager and are much more capable. Even an SMS conveys way more info than a couple of words of text, and they're much easier to see on a phone.
posted by bonehead at 11:02 AM on September 18, 2012

There seems to be some lack of knowledge of the available options for pagers. There certainly are pager systems that don't require a contract service - there are pagers that you control locally with coded radio signals. There are pagers that can provide an acknowledgement signal and basic two-way traffic. There are pager systems are automatically repeat the signal if a pager isn't acknowledging (so it gets the page when the user moves out of the dead-spot). There are pagers that I defy anyone to break without a hammer and a blow-torch. There is a reason why fire departments and EMS services use pagers not rely on cell-phones. But if you're serious, you need to talk to a proper radio vendor and let them quote you a system.
posted by Xhris at 2:39 PM on September 19, 2012