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I dont own a phone, but to me a beeper is an okay compromise. During the quest to find one, I came across some really cool things. - Some beepers are made to o
by lagniappe 3y ago
I dont own a phone, but to me a beeper is an okay compromise. During the quest to find one, I came across some really cool things.
- Some beepers are made to only RX, not TX, as to not skew results of medical equipment
- Basically 2 companies, operating with antequated websites (and prices) still provide service at the historic prices
- Beepers are still sold today, new in box
- Two-way pagers have been almost totally displaced from the market (lack of service and hardware) despite being more advanced than regular beepers.
Anybody want to share a testimonial about their current beeper for someone who's looking for a good option?
- Nicholas_C 3y agoI’m curious about your desire to not own a phone. Have you written about the experience anywhere?
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoI don't carry a cell phone, and stopped using email years ago. When I do discuss these experiences, most people aren't able to believe me. "How?" is a typical response... which to me seems equally strange a question. It does make parking difficult ("pay with the app!"); last time I had a court action, the judge required me to sign a document stating I did not use email, because this is "a required piece of information." Until this year, I handed out my numeric pager as "my phone number," which grateful reduced successful contact [to my chagrin].
- karma_pharmer 3y agoThere are lots of us. But I've learned that, aside from mentioning "I don't have a phone" it's really not useful to discuss it any further on the internet. There seems to be a large cohort of trolls who love arguing with anybody who doesn't have a phone. I guess it bothers them that some of us can be free from what so many are addicted to.
- ghaff 3y agoI wouldn't argue with you. I'd just observe that you cut yourself off from a lot of modern conveniences. (I certainly grew up without cell phone until well into my adult life and largely without Internet as well.) You don't need electricity or indoor plumbing either--although those are arguably at a different level.
- asdff 3y agoModern conveniences is right. Everything is two factor authenticated now. Even if you avoid that in your private life your workplace is liable to roll it out if they haven't already.
- ghaff 3y agoThere are alternatives to 2FA that don't require phones. But, yeah, at some point you become the weird person who refused to have a smartphone (or a cell phone at all) and, unless you're really special in some way, you probably have a target on your back.
- asdff 3y agoFor my workplace it was a choice of downloading duo on the phone or getting sms codes. In the past year they cut out the sms codes, now you get a temporary code from the duo app you need to enter into the login portal vs just a push to duo.
- codedokode 3y agoMaybe because phones allow to track people? It is a spy in your pocket.
- lagniappe 3y agoIt's Ordnung.
- wolverine876 3y agoWhich companies? Where can we read more about the no-TX design?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoI heard about it years ago probably from WP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pager#Security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pager#Security It's very inefficient because every tower must broadcast every message. This is why you can find an archive of pages from the morning of September 11th online, they transmitted unencrypted to a huge area. So that raises costs and limits the coverage area. Fine for a hospital with 100 idk doctors who need paged, not fine for continental coverage of 100 million users.
- karma_pharmer 3y agoIt's very inefficient because every tower must broadcast every message. No, it's incredibly efficient because the messages are tiny. If you need to send a long message, then you page the person with "you have a long message from XYZ, please use higher-bandwidth mechanisms to retrieve it".
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoSo it only works if you have a secondary communication system that is TX/RX. Within the scope of "How does no-TX work?" it's very inefficient, because the payload is small.
- cdchn 3y agoIts not too bad when you only need 30 kHz of bandwidth per channel.
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoI happily used PagerDirect[.net] 2020-2023 — their service includes a receive-only pager, either numeric or alphanumeric. They also have Tx pagers, but I have no experience with that service. An issue with Rx-only paging is that your device must be on 24/7, and within RF range — if offline/out-of-range, you will never receive that page. I only stopped because I moved outside of their reliable service area (but they provide service to practically any metro center with greater than 100k people). When I lived 3 miles from "downtown" the pager was a great asset (for call screening, e.g.: spammers never "figured out" how a pager worked).
- karma_pharmer 3y agoHave you found any that still have service over a significant area in the US? Particularly the one-way (RX only) pagers. Very interested in this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40070092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40070092 > - Basically 2 companies, operating with antequated websites (and prices) still provide service at the historic prices If you get a chance to add the names/links of these companies I would really appreciate it.
- karma_pharmer 3y agoFor posterity: one of the services appears to be https://spok.com https://spok.com Still would like to know what the other one is.
- johnthescott 3y agoa significant number of hospitals in usa do use american messaging, everyday: https://americanmessaging.net/ https://americanmessaging.net/
- lxgr 3y agoIridium still offers it, I believe — 100% global coverage!
- karma_pharmer 3y agoNote that the not-insanely-priced Iridium paging service requires you to transmit before you can receive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40072714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40072714
- lxgr 3y agoNo, see also my answer to your comment. SBD and Iridium paging are two different services.
- asdff 3y agoHospitals have become a sort of a standardized customer
- cdchn 3y ago>- Basically 2 companies, operating with antequated websites (and prices) still provide service at the historic prices Hold out companies for obsolete technologies always fascinate me. I remember reading there is like one guy who services candle pin bowling pin setters that run on 90s era Turbo Pascal software on whitebox 486 PCs and he's pretty much retired and drives up and down the North East in an RV doing his work.
- wkat4242 3y agoI guess in the US there's still companies providing service but here in Europe (Spain in my case) we're straight out of luck, sadly. Ps I would not want a two way pager anyway as that defeats the privacy purpose.