Why pagers are cool again

In all the fancy, super-fast, multi-generational, push-button, voice-activated mobile internet world in which we live, you would think the humble pager had rather had its non-silicon chips. But think again; partly thanks to everyone's increased anxiety in these troubled times, and partly because of the way it can help with other rather longer-standing social problems, the humble one-way text message has been given a new and unexpected lease of life.

The most striking example of this is in the City, where demand has suddenly rocketed for a terrorism-alert service that has actually been available for the past seven years. "There has been a pager alert service since the Bishopsgate bomb," says Nigel Gray, marketing director for PageONe, the company that administers the system for the City of London police, "but in the past few weeks, we have had 210 new companies sign up. We now have 1,300 companies in Westminster, the City and Docklands on the scheme."

"The best thing it does is offer some reassurance," says a spokesman for City of London police. "It's a basic system: we assess the intelligence we have and then pass it on as necessary. It's all very measured and designed to allay fears, not encourage them."

The scheme is currently only available to companies. "In the past, say with a suspected bomb, there might be advice on the pager message to move staff away from windows; now they will have their own individual action plans devised in conjunction with police." There have been a number of calls regarding suspect packages and letters in the light of recent fears about anthrax and "we pass all those on, with continuous updates, and the response has been very measured. It's not a question of panic. "

Naturally, there are also a number of technical innovations to enhance these schemes: you can now have special emergencies routed to your pager within a guaranteed 20 seconds, thanks to part of the network kept clear for the most important messages (PriorityPage). While you can set your pager on silent vibrate, you can also set it so that any critical emergencies still sound an alert. Should the pagers be lost with confidential or sensitive information stored on it, it can be disabled remotely.

The attractions of pager networks are many - they're cheap, long-lasting and reliable, and they don't run on cell networks that can be destroyed (as in New York). They will also reach people in the depths of a city wine bar. But they can also achieve what human contact won't. With Truancy Watch, a scheme currently running in the north of England, pager messages have over-come the embarrassment - or inconvenience - of calling on parents.

For one boy in his third year of secondary school, who had missed half of the previous year's schooling through "truancy and refusal", issuing a pager to his mother produced "a marked improvement", according to the welfare officer on the case. "She did not like the home-school liaison officer making nearly daily visits as her neighbours all talked about her." And for those without a home phone, the pager was sometimes the only way of getting in touch. At one school using the scheme, overall truancy levels decreased by around 27 per cent. PageOne hopes to introduce the scheme in London in due course.

The paging bug is catching on, with ambulance services now testing PriorityPage in the Greater London area. In the run-up to Christmas, there are now around 140 pubs and shops in the Covent Garden area signed up to Retail Watch and Pub Watch schemes alerting one another to thieves and troublemakers in the area.

In South Kensington, representatives of a number of hotels recently approached police to set up a paging scheme, and it has already proved useful. "We have certainly had examples where a thief who has failed at one hotel has moved on to another, and been apprehended when he has been spotted thanks to a pager message," says Dave Smith, of Charing Cross police hotel unit.

And should offenders be apprehended, it seems the pager may still be on their case. A scheme being trialled by BT in Leeds since July is helping to keep young offenders on the straight and narrow by reminding them to keep to the terms of their supervision orders - and keep them out of prison as a result. BT has also given 20,000 pagers to the unemployed, to help them search for work, following the success of similar schemes in Sweden and the United States. Fifteen "employment zones" around the UK, including Haringey and Newham in London, are being targeted, with jobs and interview details being flashed to pagers, according to preferences that have been stored on a central computer.

Whatever happened to the mobile phone?