[LINK] "Telus may be closing its pager network, but the beeper isn't dead yet"

[rfmcdonald]

CBC's Lucas Powers explains why, in parts of Canada, the pager is not yet dead. The clock is still ticking, though.

While the number of [pagers] in use has been plummeting each year since their height in the mid-'90s, Canada's Big Three telecom companies all still operate pager networks.

Although Telus announced this week that it would be discontinuing most of its Canadian pager service, a significant number of people still use beepers.

As of 2013, about 161,500 Canadians still had paging service subscriptions and the industry generated nearly $18.5 million in revenues, according to the CRTC’s most recent communications monitoring report.

The majority of remaining pager users are health-care workers and first responders, says Garry Fitzgerald, chair of the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association and CEO of PageNet, a paging service provider.

These are professions in which the stakes of communicating quickly, securely and without potential interference are at their highest and this is something pagers do consistently well, Fitzgerald says.

“Paging has become mostly a critical messaging device best used when other technologies either don’t fit the situation or simply won’t work that effectively, or at all,” he says.