Shifting Technology from Pagers to Cellular Phones

People like to stay in touch and because of technology we have many ways to communicate with one another. Because of the inventions of the telephone, the cellular phone, and also the Internet like e-mail and instant messenger, we can talk any time. What is popular today is that people can communicate anywhere. The invention of the pager and the cellular phone now allows people to talk anywhere. Pagers and cellular phones have been growing, and more people have had them over the last 15 years. Which one is going to stay popular and help people keep communicating with each other?

The pager or beeper is a dedicated RF (radio frequency) device that allows the pager user to receive messages broadcast on a specific frequency over a special network of radio base stations. A person with a pager can either get pages from a telephone number, text messaging on the screen, or the person dials up their number and puts their code in and gets a voice message from the person that is trying to contact them.

The Detroit Police Department in 1921 used the first pager-like system. The term "pager" was first used in 1959, referring to a Motorola radio communications product, a small receiver that delivered a radio message individually to those carrying the device. The first pager, as we are familiar with them today, was Motorola’s Pageboy I, introduced in 1974 (www.affordablephones.net 1). The pager at that time had no displays like today’s pagers and could not store messages, but it was portable and could notify the person that a page had been sent.

How do pagers or beepers work? Pagers are portable communication messenger devices. The person sending the message uses a touch-tone phone and calls the pagers' number, then the person enters their number or voice message and within moments the pager carrier is notified by an audible "beep" or a silent vibration. The number or voice message can be read on the pagers' screen.

By the 1980s, pagers grew, and more people wanted to be able to communicate with each other. In 1980, there were about 3.2 million pager users in the world. But at this time there was a limited range of people who could use the pagers. Also, they were used for only on-site situations, like for medical workers within a hospital (www.affordablephones.net 2). Hospital workers have them in case of emergencies and the doctor needs to get to a very ill person.

1990 invented wide area paging, and over 22 million pagers were in use at that time. But only 4 years later over 61 million pagers were in use and that is when pagers became popular for personal uses, not just business use.

There are different kinds of pagers people can buy and use. The one-pager is the numeric pager, it just prints the numbers of the person who called. How a person does this is the caller dials an access number, enters a PIN of the person he or she wants to reach, and then enters their phone number and hits the # button. A person with this pager can get service for parts of countries. Another pager is the alphanumeric pager, which prints a text message up to 80 characters. What the person does to get a hold of the person they are trying to contact is the caller delivers a message to a human operator, which types the text message to the pager. Having this pager you have more range of getting pages, you could be in New York City, Grand Rapids, on the ground, or at 35,000 feet. With either service, you get the messages within a minute or two after they are sent (Sullivan 128). Further, there is the digital pager, which transmits the number to call or a brief message by appending digital codes to the paging signal (Straubhaar, LaRose 329). With these pagers, you can get stock market quotes and sports scores. Another pager you can buy now a day is the two-way pager. A person can type a message to a person like “What time are you coming home for dinner?” and the other person now can answer “6:00 or 7:00” because of two-way paging.

Pagers in the early 1990s were the craze, and everyone from lawyers to teenagers had one at that time. But pagers at this time started to become no longer cool and people started to buy cell phones because it became the norm with both professionals and teenagers who once had pagers. Now you don’t hear the beeping and buzzing of a pager, but the ringing and different musical sounds from a cellular telephone. Why there was a decline in pagers was because in recent years the price of cell phones has dropped, and they have great deals with these phones.

The concept of the cellular phone began in 1947 when some researchers took a mobile car phone and realized that by using small cells range of service area that you can still communicate. In 1973, Dr. Martin Cooper patent the cellular phone for Motorola. Cellular is a type of wireless communication that is most familiar to mobile phones users. Cooper made the first call on a portable cell phone in April 1973(www.privateline.com 1). However, Motorola was the first to incorporate the technology into a portable device that was designed for outside automobile use. It's called cellular because the system uses many base stations to divide a service area into multiple cells. Cellular calls are transferred from a base station to a base station as a user travels from cell to cell. When having the first cell phones they operated from a single antenna and could only handle 46 simultaneous conversations in one area. This meant that when the 47th caller dialed up they would receive a dial tone(Straubhaar, LaRose 329). But people using cell phones were growing and they could only use a limited number of channels.

Changes and the growth of cellular telephone expanded customers and the service of cell phones. In 1978, Advanced Mobile Phone Service or AMPS started to operate in North America which was a cellular telephone service. They had ten cells covering 21,000 square miles in the Chicago area which was a trial run but after 6 months they marketed the phones into cars. The new cellular phone system had over 2000 trial cellular phone customers (www.affordablephones.net 3).

In 1982 the FCC finally authorized commercial cellular phone service in the USA. A year later the first American commercial cellular phone service AMPS was offered an analog phone service by Ameritech. Even with such a demand for cell phones in the United States, it took cellular phone service 37 years to become commercially available. Consumer demand quickly outstripped the 1982 system standards. By 1987, cellular telephone subscribers exceeded one million and the airways were crowded.

The three ways the FCC could improve the service were one increase frequencies allocation, two split existing cells of three improve the technology. The FCC did not want to hand out any more bandwidth, and building/splitting cells would have been expensive and would have added bulk to the network. To stimulate the growth of new technology, the FCC declared in 1987 that cellular licensees could employ alternative cellular technologies in the 800 MHz band. The cellular industry began to research new transmission technology as an alternative.

What is the difference between analog and digital cellular? Commercials about a 100% digital network scream from the TV. Print advertisements' black ink blare the magic of "digital" wireless services. More and more wireless services are touting the benefits of an all-digital network. So what exactly is the big deal with digital and how does it compare to analog cellular technology? Here's a look at where digital and its predecessor cellular technology came from and where's it going so you can decide if your wireless phone should talk digital or not.

In 1990 North America started going digital because they need to increase capacity. In March of 1990, they picked digital cellular which cut down the voice channels from 30KHz to 10KHz (www.priviateline.com 2). Many nationwide wireless service providers have a digital network in place or are at least in the process of trying to convert their cellular network to a digital network. The reason is digital presents many advantages over cellular. The main benefits of digital include better quality of service, more security for the customer, and the ability to support next-generation services. Operators are looking to digital technology to help enable the whiz-bang services of tomorrow, like wireless Internet applications.

Digital is known to up the efficiency in the network, meaning an operator can fit more information into each transmission; that's why so many are now converting their systems to digital. You can increase capacity by switching over to digital cellular. For a wireless operator, this means that they can get more bang for their buck from their network. Operators using digital would also be able to supply their customers with the hottest new services that were being talked about. Some of these services include features that customers had already gotten accustomed to on their regular phone, like wireless call waiting, as well as some messaging services.

Digital offers a better quality of sound. Proponents of digital claimed too that because digital scrambled up the signals into bursts, it was more secure than analog and can help thwart cloning, an act of grabbing phone account information over the air to copy then resell that information for piracy purposes. By some industry estimates, close to $650 million in wireless services has been coveted by these big-eared crooks, which only adds onto the operator's bottom line a cost that is eventually passed on to the customer. Digital has stronger battery life than analog, and for the most part, better, more modern features on the phones.

Analog technology refers to electronic transmission accomplished by adding signals of varying frequency or amplitude to carrier waves of a given frequency. Analog cellular uses more voice channels and is not as clear as digital cellular phones. Roaming may be more difficult using a digital-based phone than an analog cellular. Since today there is no single accepted industry standard in digital technology and the technologies are incompatible, roaming or using another wireless operator's network while traveling may be difficult.

By the early 1990s cellular telephone was finally worldwide wide and the three many areas where cell phones were bought were Scandinavia, the United States, and Japan(www.privateline.com 3). By 1992 two companies created wireless cellular and in March of 1993, Japan went to digital cellular. By the mid-1990’s America needed more wireless channels and the existing cellular bands had no more room. Finally, the United States got more service and many more frequencies were needed to handle all the customers. The FCC got new licensing for wireless use and the FCC began auctioning new designated PCS bands from December 1994 to January 1997 (www.privateline.com 4). The result was that several carriers were licensed in each metropolitan area and the FCC thought that the new competition would bring lower rates. The lower prices did not occur at this time. But cellular prices now have gone down because of the different offers each company offers now.

It seems like pagers and cell phones will be fighting it out all the time. In the early 1990’s more people had pagers so they could keep communicating with one another. But now cellular telephones have taken over. It was only about five years ago that pagers or beepers were the ultimate status symbol. The doctor wore them, techies clipped them onto their belts, drug dealers used them and kids who didn't own pagers gazed with envy at kids who did. But that changed almost overnight. The once-popular item is now on its way to extinction, thanks to the proliferation of cellular phones. While the cost of pagers is less than that of mobile phones, the mobile phone service is so inexpensive, so ubiquitous, and you get so much for it that the idea of a separate pager.

The debate is whether pagers or cellular phones networks will offer the best wireless system for a person(Berlind 1). While the company no longer provides results on the paging business, he estimates that sales have dropped since then to $700 million in 2000 and an expected $430 million in 2001. Sales have been going down for Motorola's pager business for a long period now because people are buying cellular phones to communicate with one another. Pagers were once a strong industry that easily beat the mobile phone business in the early 1980s. Then, mobile phone service, which preceded current cellular service, was more primitive, limited in scale, and pricey. It was a no-brainer for customers to choose pagers that sold for $300 to $400, compared with mobile phones priced at$3,000 to $5,000. That changed as telecommunications firms developed more reliable cellular networks, attractive cell phones, and dropped service and phone prices. Compared with paging services, which cost about $10 a month, consumers could get a basic service with more features than pagers for about $20.Wireless firms also heavily subsidized mobile phones so customers could receive one free with service or pay just a little more for a better phone.

It is the person's choice if they want a pager or a cellular phone nowadays. Technology is changing so much anymore that next cellular phones are going to change to something more advanced. If you want someone giving their number to you or writing messages to you but if you just want to talk you should invest in a cellular telephone.