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It’s 2013. Who still uses pagers? The simple answer is that a lot of people still use pagers. Here’s more:

Last month healthcare technology expert, Greg Slabodkin, published an article estimating that there are still 3.5 million pagers in use in the healthcare industry. Additionally, “according to one estimate, more than 90 percent of hospitals use pagers.” Again, these numbers are only from the healthcare sector.

Verizon has an entire “Enterprise Solution” for one-way paging. Verizon reaches out to government agencies, teams of first responders, service technicians, and more. It doesn’t seem too far fetched to estimate that there could be millions of others outside of healthcare that still use pagers. One interesting note about pagers, in 1994 the FCC reports that over 61 million pagers were in use.

Given the recent growth and advancements in the mobile device industry, these numbers are surprising. Then again, when a solution works for a group of people, it works. Sometimes the “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” strategy is the way to go.

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