You might be surprised to know that paging services is growing steadily each year, despite the proliferation of cell phones. While at first glance it seems a bit counter-intuitive that someone would prefer a pager over a cell phone, it really is not if you understand this niche industry.

Right now, in the U.S. alone, there are millions upon millions of pagers in use, and that number continues to grow each year. There are many reasons why corporations and individuals would choose the use of an alpha-numeric pager over a cell phone.

The first reason many professionals in high-demand, such as doctors and on-call technical staff, choose to use an alpha-numeric pager is because they have a larger range of reach than cellular phones. Cellular phones rely on the location of cell towers while alpha-numeric pagers do not; they use satellites and radio towers.

This difference alone insures that pagers have a larger range and higher percentage of availability than a cell phone. With a nationwide paging ability, a pager can be activated a long way from where reliable cell phone services reside. You might be interested to know that pagers will activate on an airplane while a cell phone will not!

While the pagers of old were large, clunky objects which had an annoying alert and presented you with simply a return call number, the much improved alpha-numeric pagers of today come with scrolling LCD screens, e-mail capability, two-way communication abilities, and pleasing ring tones which rival even the best cell phones on the market.

Large corporations which span the nation, use paging services to keep their remote staff up to date on company happenings and necessary emergent news. Through the usage of two-way nationwide paging they allow the remote employees to answer their messages without the large costs of having each employee on a cellular phone plan.

With the use of a two-way alpha-numeric pager corporations can ensure communication between themselves and their staff without having to deal with issues of abusing cell phones for personal calls, or staff claiming they were out of range of a cellular tower when important news breaks.

Another advantage of alpha-numeric pagers over cell phones is their ability to run on a single AA battery for months. Where a cell phone needs constant re-charging, a pager will run approximately three months on that one single battery.

This makes them much more reliable and less prone to be out of service because of power issues.

One additional reason which users prefer a pager to a cell phone is what I like to call the "annoyance" factor. Where a cell phone generally requires you to answer it, simply because someone is on the other end of the line, an alpha-numeric pager allows you to read about the issue and respond in your own time and in your desired fashion. This allows the user to deal with work but not have to be overly available every time someone needs to reach them.

Whatever your remote communication needs, an alpha-numeric pager is still a very viable option for today. With nationwide paging, an alpha-numeric pager is reachable in areas where cell phones are not, yet will allow you to respond in your own time to the needs of the person on the other end.