Pagers: Going, going...Ten years from now, when we look back at the key mobile technologies of yesteryear, how many of us will remember the once-ubiquitous pager? Perhaps not many. But pagers deserve much more credit than that. For many, these devices provided the first taste of mobile communications--an addictive one as well. Pagers also introduced the concept of contacting a person instead of a place, and heralded an end to personal solitude for some. Pagers saw their heyday in 1998, when penetration rates soared above 40 percent, according to figures from the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). Unfortunately, the demand could not be sustained, and it quickly went south, starting from July that same year. In August 1999, mobile phones all but overtook pagers in terms of market penetration for the first time, prompting doomsayers to bleat about the pager's impending demise. As of January 2002, IDA reported that pager penetration was languishing at 11.5 percent, with less than 500,000 subscribers. Motorola, the world's biggest maker of pagers, sounded the death knell last year when it announced it would stop producing one-way pagers by the second half of 2002.
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