PAGERS: COLORING FUTURE COMMUNICATION

The newest pagers are small and sleek.

Pagers aren't just for business people and emergency personnel anymore. In fact, pagers have become as much a social tool as a business tool.

In a recent study, half of the people using pagers are using them for social reasons, Suzanne Cross of Ameritech's Chicago office said in an interview last week. The other 50 percent are using pagers for business purposes.

Cross, Ameritech's director of products management for paging, credits the upsurge in pager use to the reduced cost of pagers and paging services and the mobility of society.

Some facts

-- There are between 45 million and 55 million pagers in use.

-- Twenty-five percent of people with mobile telephones carry pagers.

-- One of two people who say they need to be reached in a moment's notice, use pagers.

-- Multi-pager families -- particularly those with teen-agers -- are becoming more common.

Cross said that in many cases the family's use of a pager and the family's business use of pagers have become blurred.

Many working mothers use pagers to help keep track of work, day care and social schedules.

Women who run businesses out of their homes also use pagers so they don't miss messages, said Don Hinkebein of Johnson Communications of Cape Girardeau.

And it's becoming a trend that when teen-agers get their driver's licenses, they also get pagers from their parents, Cross said.

Locally, Hinkebein estimated that 17 percent of the population has pagers. That's about 6,000 people in the Cape Girardeau area.

As operations manager, Hinkebein said pager customers for Johnson Communications range from multimillion-dollar businesses to the "kid at McDonald's."

The variety of pager uses reflect the nature of the coverage required by people with pagers.

Coverage and uses

-- In-house coverage can be as small as a restaurant notifying customers when a table is ready.

-- User-own network paging is a wider network, like a university using pagers for just the campus and surrounding area.

-- Regional and local coverage has even broader boundaries.

-- Nationwide service helps people who need to keep in touch with workers and clients throughout the nation.

-- Global coverage uses satellites so people can receive pages from around the world.

Hinkebein said the "kitchen pagers," in-house pagers, have been around for about 10 years.

Trucking companies use the nationwide service of Teletouch's dial-a-page, said Karen Underwood, a communications consultant at dial-a-page in Cape Girardeau. Local businesses use the local page service, she said.

Teletouch, which focuses on the smaller markets in a nine-state region in the southeastern portion of the United States, has 349,700 pagers in use, according to its annual report.

Hinkebein said pagers are a low-cost way to be notified when people need to reach you.

The Community Counseling Center in Cape Girardeau uses pagers. In fact, it has about 50 pagers for its 160 employees in the five-county area.

The center, a comprehensive mental health center, has several programs that pagers are essential to, said Claire Lafoon, coordinator of education and training at the center.

First, Lafoon said, the 24-hour crisis line has therapists on call who use pagers. In this instance, the therapists on call for the night take one of the agency's pagers with them and are paged by the center if an emergency arises.

Lafoon said therapists usually get several pages when on call.

Second, the community-based workers who see their clients in the field carry pagers so they can be reached by the center and referral agencies.

These workers are out in the field, and pagers are a way to keep in touch with them, Lafoon said.

Third, some specialists have specific clients they work with on a 24-hour basis. These specialists usually give their pager numbers to members of the families they work with, allowing the clients to have a direct contact with their specialist.

Lafoon, who has been at the center for 12 years, has seen a change from people being almost exclusively treated at the center to an expansion into the community by therapists and specialists.

There are still traditional services done at the center, she said, but pagers have allowed workers to take their services outside the center and to the client.

Pagers allow specialists and therapists and the center a low-cost means to be contacted in an unobtrusive way, she said.

When specialists get pages, there isn't the commotion that a cellular telephone might bring, she said.

Some history

-- Motorola was a leader in the development of pagers.

-- Johnson Communications was the first paging service in Southeast Missouri.

In 1956, Motorola developed a small radio receiver called a pager that delivered a radio message selectively to a particular individual carrying the device, according to a company timeline on the company's Web site.

Hospitals were among the first to use the pagers.

Nine years later, Motorola developed a transistor radio pager called "Pageboy" and supplied the pager to the Bell System, which called it the "Bellboy."

A breakthrough occurred in the 1980s when Motorola supplied 43,000 Pocket Bell pagers to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone of Japan.

Within two years of the pager's introduction into Japan in 1982, there were 200,000 pagers in use.

About this time Motorola also developed the "Sensar" pager, which was less than 6 inches long.

Johnson Communications dates to 1959 when the Federal Communications Commission allocated radio frequencies to business and industry.

Johnson Radio & TV was formed as the authorized Motorola service center to install and repair Motorola two-way radio equipment in Southeast Missouri and Southern Illinois.

The company's principal accounts included police and fire departments, construction companies, vending companies and taxi cab companies.

In 1970, Johnson formed a partnership with Clarence W. Suedekum to become J&S Communications to offer the area's first paging service. All the pages and radio transmissions were delivered manually with the assistance of Cape Answering Service.

Johnson later became the first 24-hour live telephone answering service in Southeast Missouri.

The company formed Tel-Link as a division to offer paging services in 1987.

Cross said that pagers and paging services were a "bit pricey" in the early stages of the industry, but as the prices came down. the use of pagers expanded.

Some trends

-- Brightly colored pagers.

-- Vibrating pagers.

-- Text pagers.

-- Pager voice mail.

-- Two-way pagers.

Originally the pager was a small black tool that beeped or made a tone to alert its carrier. But with more fashion-conscious women and teen-agers using pagers, the market has opened up to a variety of colored pagers and a variety of alerting mechanisms.

Most pager companies offer pagers with tones, melodies or vibrator alerting mechanisms, Hinkebein said.

Besides the cosmetic trends, pagers now offer packages with information services included. The text pagers can offer people access to the stock market, sports scores and a variety of other information services.

The pager can be programmed to give 15-minute updates of the particular teams or stocks a person follows.

Generally, Cross said, there are five to 10 such services available on a text pager.

Motorola said the top-of-the-line text pager "has enough storage for a small novel."

Two-way pagers offer access to Web sites and databases in the Internet.

Pagers also have the ability to allow for voice mail. Underwood demonstrated this feature when she called her pager and left a test voice mail message. Almost immediately, she was notified of the page and the voice mail. She called her voice mail and received the message.

On the horizon

__ Handheld organizers allow people to organize their schedules through their pagers.

-- The Web clip will eventually allow the pager to access select information from the Internet.

-- More integration with computers will expand the uses of the pager.

Cross said paging has become more tied into the messaging system in general when used with computers.

For example, pagers can become organizers, telling the user what meetings or events are scheduled that day.

In a January news release, Motorola introduced its smart pager with organizer features.

The company described some of the features as having a built-in personal information manager with telephone book, calendar and do-list capabilities.

The smart page allows the pager to track appointments and store and retrieve data as well as receive messages.

The Web clip, which Cross said is about 18 months away from being on the market, will have buttons where people will be able to use the handheld computer to find information through a pager.

For example, if she were planning a trip to Boston and needed to know the schedule of flights to Boston. With the screen of the handheld computer with a paging card in it, the pager can access the flight database and retrieve the flight schedules and put them at her fingertips.

While pagers remain small, wearable and sturdy, their functions are becoming more flexible.

And, Cross said, the more ways business needs to use the text pager, the more applications will be designed for it.

Merging the pager with the computer has opened the future to a myriad of uses for the pager.