Business Paging Applications
There are extensive examples of modern day applications, which utilise wide area paging networks. Some applications will be cost effective solutions where using alternative means of messaging would be too costly. Some require instant message delivery, others leverage the broadcast abilities of the paging networks.
Alerting a team in an emergency
Your team maybe on call in the event of an emergency day or night. Each member of the team carries a message pager with them, which has two alert numbers. The first is the individual number used for personal messaging, the second is the emergency group number. When there is an incident, or training exercise, a message is sent to the group alert number. All of the team will receive the message at the same time without any delay. The message will tell them what the incident is and what they should do. For example:
“14:23 –68: Emergency Group Call: Gas leak at chemical terminal 43, require immediate response to gate 24 and await further instructions”
Information can be repeated or updated frequently without any risk of pager memory overload as each pager always receives the message, and if the pager memory is full, the oldest is overwritten. Typical memory sizes allow more than 30 240-character messages to be stored at any one time.
PageOne’s paging network also has priority override pagers that will alert even if the pager has been set to silent mode.
Getting your jobs for the day
The paging networks can also deliver information to individuals to improve business efficiency and achieve cost savings. Sending information to a field-based team via pagers is a simple and easy way keep staff informed at all times. For example:
“08:01 –02: Mr Simon, 293a Downs Rd. Ewell, SM9 1SD 020 8917 8890 computer will not boot, suspect faulty hard disk, customer requires disk replacement and data recovery if possible.”
“08:02 –03: G Spires, 21 Thornton Rd, Thornton Heath. 202 8913 8790 central heating gas boiler not lighting. Customer OAP requires priority call attendance.”
Keeping your servers monitored
Many organisations use paging to monitor their IT networks. When a server goes off-line for any reason it could cause huge disruption and lost revenue, so SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) applications are used to monitor complex IT networks that include alarm trap thresholds which generate message alarms to the paging network, for example:
“01:56 –98: Webserver acc55 raid5 NAS disk error - auto reboot in progress. Error code:98-23-44”
Receive email notifications on your pager
Long before Blackberry’s were invented pagers could receive SMTP (Simple Message Transfer Protocol – email) messages to alert the user that an email is waiting in their inbox. Many customers today also use their pagers to monitor their email systems and respond if there are urgent messages waiting. For someone who cannot afford a Blackberry this could be a very cost effective alternative.
09:30 –23: Sub: April Board Meeting from:>> john.holls@millers.co.uk>> Message: Hi guys, please note board meeting time has been put back to 14:30 many thanks, John.
