Gone are the days when paging executives like Vincent Kelly, president and CEO of USA Mobility, feared the uptake of PCS and cellular devices would wipe out the paging industry.
The widespread adoption of mobile phones in the United States did pretty much what paging companies expected: It negated the need for pagers among many consumers. But segments still rely heavily on pagers, especially among emergency response personnel. USA Mobility’s biggest user segment is healthcare, followed by government and Fortune 1000 companies.
In an interview, Kelly pointed out that USA Mobility’s pagers worked even during disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the bridge collapse in Minnesota and more recently, the 5.4 magnitude earthquake that hit Southern California. Its paging network doesn’t rely on wireline connections and uses satellites, so it can keep working when cellular systems are taxed or produce the fast-busy signals that mean calls can’t get through.
Nowadays, Kelly is more likely to find himself trying to educate government officials about the benefits of paging. The National Public Safety Telecommunication Council (NPSTC) has advocated that the FCC allocate 2-way paging spectrum to government agencies so they can build out their own paging services, which he said is a waste of taxpayer money. Government agencies can and do use paging networks to meet their needs.
In fact, Kelly has met with device manufacturers and would like to see them incorporate a paging Flex or ReFlex chip inside of mobile phones, but so far, carriers haven’t thrown their support behind that idea. It would be an inexpensive component to add into phones, and that way, people could fall back to the paging network when the cellular system gets overloaded in emergencies, he said.
Kelly acknowledged that USA Mobility is a public company and it’s his job to look out for shareholders, and getting more government users on his network would be beneficial. But it’s also good for first responders and the public to have access to the paging network, he said.
Motorola sold its paging business years ago, so now USA Mobility’s pagers are primarily made by Asian manufacturers that license the intellectual property.
Kelly’s company is the largest paging operator left standing, reporting more than 3.17 million units in service at the end of June. USA Mobility formed with the merger of Arch Wireless and Metrocall in 2004.