At least nine people, including an eight-year-old girl, have died as a result of exploding pager devices across Lebanon.
The use of pagers to attack members of the militant group Hezbollah has renewed focus on a device which stopped being widely used years ago.
So why were Hezbollah using them and what are they?
What is a pager?
Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in the belief they could evade Israeli location tracking, two sources familiar with the group's operations told Reuters earlier this year.
Unlike mobile phones, pagers work on radio waves — the operator can send a message by radio frequency rather than the internet.
Dr David Tuffley, a socio-technology expert from the University of New South Wales, said he could understand why people would use such a device today.
“They’re surprisingly useful for any situations where cellphone use is unreliable,” he said.
“So, it would have been seen as a safer, you know, less prone to detection type communication method for Hezbollah than mobile phones.”
Are pagers still widely used?
While less common than they once were, pagers are still used across the world in healthcare, mining, emergency services and many professions where people work in areas with no phone reception.
In Australia, they are still used in several sectors, Robert Nicholls, a researcher with the University of Sydney, said.
“There are Australians working in hospitals, mines, and chemical plants that would still wear a pager at work,” he said.
“I say chemical plants, because pagers can be safe to use in environments where a spark or radio emission would be dangerous.”
They are favoured by some first responders due to their ability to get a message out to multiple people urgently and without interruption, and their long battery life.
“Pagers actually use frequencies that are similar to FM radios and those frequencies are able to penetrate thick walls and metal barriers and that’s why pagers are reliable in healthcare settings,” Associate Professor Ritesh Chugh, Socio-tech expert from Central Queensland University, said.
“And because pagers are one-way communication although we do have two-way pagers as well, there is less traffic on the network whereas cellphone networks have a lot of traffic.”
Pagers seen as a more ‘secure’ option
Pagers are seen as more secure, robust devices than mobile phones because the chances of being intercepted are low.
“Pagers themselves cannot be tracked easily as they are only receivers,” Professor Nicholls said.
“Phones need to transmit regularly to tell the mobile network where they are and pagers do not do this.”
Professor Nicholls said pagers have been known to be used for less legitimate reasons, such as dealing drugs because those illegal activities “only need one-way communications”.
Professor Chugh said he was not surprised to hear they have also been utilised by “terrorist organisations as well.”
“Pagers, which were widely used before the advent of smartphones and advanced encryption methods, provide a means for secure, discreet communication, which is crucial for groups operating in clandestine environments,” he said.
“Their use aligns with the historical need for secure communication methods, particularly in areas with limited or disrupted telecommunications infrastructure.”
When were they invented?
The use of pagers dates all the way back to 1921.
Detroit Police Department in the US started using a pager system when they successfully put a radio-equipped police car into service.
In 1950 a pager-like device was created by Al Gross, the inventor who patented the walkie-talkie and cordless phone, for use by doctors at the Jewish Hospital in New York.
How did the use of pagers evolve?
In 1959, Motorola coined the term pager and introduced the first transistorised pager to the market the following year.
The device was quite simple in the beginning but use exploded in the 1980s when wide-area paging was invented, allowing messages to be conveyed over radio waves across a city, state, or a country.
“Motorola was the sort of populariser of it and it sort of grew in popularity to something like 60 or 70 million people,” Dr Tuffley said.
“Pagers were being used around the world by 1994, so I mean, I guess by today's standards, 60 million is not that many for world use but it was really just used by people who really did need it.”
While many people will never have used a pager, they became commonplace in TV shows and other popular culture references, with a stream of programs involving hospital emergency rooms or kerbside drug dealing featuring lead characters carrying pagers.
By the early 2000s, use had dropped as a result of the increased use of the mobile phone.
Over time, there have been changes to allow the messaging to be two-way, but the main use has been for the one-way delivery of a message.
Are people buying pagers still?
Professor Nicholls said pagers are still bought by businesses and some organisations because they are “reliable and cheap to run”.
“The demand is high enough that there are still pager manufacturers in Taiwan and China,” he said.
“However, there is no consumer-level demand.
“That is, pagers are owned and issued by organisations.”
What do we know about the pagers used by Hezbollah?
A senior Lebanese security source told Reuters that 5,000 of the Gold Apollo beepers had been ordered by the group earlier in the year.
Gold Apollo is a Taiwanese company.
He identified a photograph of the model of the pager, an AR-924, which like other pagers wirelessly receives and displays text messages but cannot be used to make telephone calls.
Gold Apollo's company founder Hsu Ching-Kuang has told reporters they did not make the pagers that were used in the detonations in Lebanon on Tuesday (local time).
The company said in a statement that the AR-924 model was produced and sold by BAC.
"We only provide brand trademark authorisation and have no involvement in the design or manufacturing of this product," the statement said.
Mr Ching-Kuang said Gold Apollo and BAC established a relationship three years ago.
Mr Ching-Kuang said the pagers were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taiwanese firm's brand.
"The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it," he said.
