Death Of The Pager?

Before the mobile phone became the status symbol of the late 1990s, there was the pager. Teenagers, doctors and executives all had them.

The tiny, electronic devices that beep or chirp when their phone number is dialed appear to be going the way of so many other devices that have outlived their utility. Motorola , the world's biggest manufacturer of paging devices, said it will discontinue making pagers that work on the ReFlex two-way paging network technology it developed.

There's still a business in paging, though. Companies like SkyTel, a unit of Worldcom , still do a decent business selling both the service and the devices to doctors and other hyperconnected sorts who need to be easily reachable by phone. But two-way paging has had to get smarter in recent years, allowing for e-mail and Web access. Research In Motion makes pager-like devices that are capable of browsing the Web and can also work with the instant messaging services provided by companies such as Yahoo! and AOL Time Warner .

Motorola, however, will pay more attention to developing messaging on devices that function via the wireless phone networks. It's also the world's second-largest maker of mobile phones, hoping to surpass Finland's Nokia as the world's biggest mobile-phone maker.

Paging was a good business for Motorola for a while. Its pagers account for more than 80% of the market, and at one time contributed as much as $2 billion to its top line. But as the prices of mobile phones fell, so did the popularity of pagers. Having sold some 2 million pagers since 1997, the units are no longer the revenue drivers they used to be.

But an important legacy of the pager age will be the networks left in place. Those networks exist in most major cities in the U.S., and are still good at sending and receiving short data messages. One interesting use of the ReFlex technology is for location-based services.

A company called Locate Networks, based in Kirkland, Wash., has developed a system that allows a device the approximate size of a pager to keep track of its own location using Global Positioning System technology. Anyone tracking a person, vehicle or a shipment in transit could send a message out over the ReFlex network, and receive a reply giving its precise location.

Other companies like Glenayre use the ReFlex network to carry e-mail messages to and from its Activelink device, which works with Handspring's Visor line of Palm OS handhelds. Even the country's second-largest Internet service provider Earthlink offers a service that pushes e-mail to its subscribers over the ReFlex network. But it's also started offering a similar service using Research In Motion's Blackberry devices.

While pagers may fade from popular use in the face of the mobile phone, the networks will remain a useful resource for transmitting wireless data for years to come.

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