The simultaneous explosion of electronic pagersused by militant group Hezbollah injured some 2,800 people across Lebanon and killed 12. While many questions remain about how, exactly, these devices were compromised in what experts said may have been an attack by Israel, Tuesday’s explosions spotlighted a largely forgotten piece of technology.
Hezbollah turned to pagers, in part, to avoid Israel’s highly sophisticated surveillance; the group’s leadership ordered its members to stop using cellphones earlier this year over fears they could be used to track fighters. Given that pagers are so low tech, experts believe Israel may have infiltrated the supply chain that Hezbollah uses for its pagers to physically compromise them. The Israeli military declined to comment on whether it was responsible for the attack.
Outside Hezbollah, who still uses pagers? Is there much of a supply chain for pagers these days? Here’s what to know.
First, what are pagers? When were pagers invented and popular?
A wireless pager, also known as a beeper, is a small electronic device used to receive an alert or message, and in some cases, also send them. It was initially patented in 1949 by Al Gross, an inventor who was also behind the walkie-talkie and the cordless telephone. When he first tried to market the device at a medical convention, doctors were not keen; they complained that it could ruin afternoon golf trips, according to a 2001 obituary for Gross.
But pagers eventually soared in popularity, especially in the 1980s and ’90s, as a primary way people could be reached on the go before the advent of mobile phones. By 1984, an estimated 3 million Americans used pagers, as The Washington Post reported at the time. By 1994, there were 61 million pagers in use, according to Spok, a pager manufacturer. Pagers were also icons in pop culture, even the subject of a rap called “Beepers,” which featured the bleeping sound of a pager throughout.
Why did pagers get less popular?
The public largely fell out of love with pagers and in love with mobile phones. As mobile phones became cheaper, Motorola — then the world’s biggest pager manufacturer — announced it was discontinuing pagers in 2001. “No one wants to send a page when you can just call someone on their cellphone,” as one telecommunications researcher told the New York Times in 2002.
Over the next decades, as cellphones became more ubiquitous and advanced, pager usage dwindled to a fraction of what it once was. Instead of running to a phone after getting paged, people were able to receive calls and exchange messages — and eventually connect to the internet — right from the devices in their pockets. The first smartphone, with a touch-screen interface and functions including a calendar and address book, was designed by IBM and went on sale in 1994. The market developed over the years that followed, with the launch of more advanced third-generation (3G) mobile phone networks in 2001 and the first iPhone by Apple in 2007.
How much of a market is there today for pagers?
It’s not clear how many people around the world still use pagers, but there are a few companies left that are making them.
The Taiwan-based company Gold Apollo — which said Wednesday it did not make the devices that exploded — is one of the world’s primary producers of pagers. Founded in 1995, Gold Apollo has exported 41,000 pagers so far this year. It exported more than 260,000 from 2022 through August this year, according to data from Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs. While some photos published to social media of the damaged pagers’ back panels match markings of the AR-924 produced by the company, Gold Apollo said the AR-924 pagers were “entirely handled” by the Hungarian company BAC Consulting KFT, which did not immediately reply to The Post’s requests for comment.
Spok, which said it is the largest paging network in the United States, sells the devices there and in Australia. It has a “closed supply chain” for its paging devices, it said in a statement to The Post, which are manufactured in secure facilities specifically for Spok and then sent directly to Spok to be configured and distributed to the users.
Who still uses pagers, and why?
Hospitals in many countries still use pagers, which use their own communications system and can be more reliable in emergencies or if WiFi or phone networks fail. Spok, which offers paging services to hospitals, said the devices are battery powered and their signals can get “through concrete and steel when a smartphone signal may not.”
In 2019, the British government said the country’s National Health Service used around 130,000 of the devices. At the time, it said NHS use represented more than 1 in 10 of the world’s pagers.
Since then, the NHS has moved away from using pagers in non-emergency situations, saying it is going to phase out the use of them in favor of cheaper alternatives such as mobile phones and apps, which enable staff to share information and prioritize tasks more easily than with one-way pagers.
Pagers have been used by first responders, including fire departments, in recent years. In Australia, they are used in mines and chemical plants, where sparks of radio emissions could be dangerous, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Pagers have also been used somewhat recently by personnel at critical infrastructure sites, including at nuclear and electric plants, and at defense contractors, Trend Micro researchers found in 2016. The pagers were used to automate their industrial control systems, but researchers cited concerns about the security of unencrypted messages. They are also used by individuals who are distrustful of digital vulnerabilities and the potential for governments and companies to collect data on users of higher-tech devices. Dan Geer, a renowned cybersecurity expert, told The Post in 2014 that he used a pager, speaking on his distrust of increasing data collection.