The days of getting ‘beeped’ are coming to an end.
Spark says it will decommision its paging network on 31 March 2017.
The paging system was introduced to New Zealand in 1988.
At the technology's peak in 1994 there were 61 million paging users globally.
While paging has historically been used as a messaging option in many industries, customer demand has been on a perpetual decline for more than a decade as businesses have moved to mobile-based messaging solutions, and as the underlying analogue network ages it has become more vulnerable to outages and increasingly uneconomic to maintain, Spark says.
“We’ve explored selling the paging network and so far we haven’t found a buyer," Spark chief operating officer David Havercroft says.
Volunteer fireman Jarrod Gilbert says pagers are used by 8000-odd fire service volunteers.
Mr Havercroft says, “We plan to work closely with all our customers including important government, health and emergency services over the next 20 months to identify their needs and transition them to a new appropriate digital solution. Options for some customers, like the health industry could include providing their own on-site paging network at hospitals.”
NBR understands pagers also maintain a degree of popularity in the drug dealing community.
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Spark switching off pager network
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