Comment by 8organicbits

Comment by 8organicbits 3 days ago

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I've used them for DevOps on-call in the last ten years in the US, as a backup to phone-based alerts. It's far too easy to mess up phone DND settings, forget to charge a phone, be outside cell service, or leave a phone in the wrong room. The pager had a long battery life and I clipped it to my pants waistband. I definitely caught pages via the pager that I would have missed over the phone.

If you're worried about the cell network going down, they serve as a backup comms device as well since they use different infrastructure.

tptacek 3 days ago

Presumably Lebanese DevOps on-call isn't sharing pagers from a shipment to Hezbollah from Iran.

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  • sudosysgen 3 days ago

    Hezbollah is essentially a government entity in much of Lebanon, they totally would. Hezbollah runs schools, hospitals - it's easily the largest social services provider in large swathes of Lebanon. That's why it enjoys so much support, in many ways it was a much more competent alternative to the failed Lebanese government.

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    • tptacek 3 days ago

      People who work in schools in Lebanon carry smartphones like everybody else. Pagers are obsolete. Some doctors may carry them because they work when the cell network is down, but they don't all re-up from Iran all at once. Hezbollah carries pagers because they're one-way devices that are hard to track, which is not a problem a Lebanese school teacher has with his Chinese Android phone.

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      • 8organicbits 3 days ago

        What makes you think pagers are obsolete? When I worked at a big-three cloud provider (2016) we used them and it was a great fit for on-call requirements. I regularly find I don't have cell service when in large buildings, out in the woods, or even just random spots in US cities. The pager didn't have those issues, and helped us build highly available services. Does Fly use something different for on-call alerts?

        A quick search shows the US Government/Army [1] and hospitals use them [2] [3] [4]. I'm not familiar with Lebanese wireless networks, but pagers are certainly still used for these use-cases in the US.

        "Residents reported that they used one-way pagers for work-related communication more often than smartphones" (2018)

        [1] https://gov.spok.com/contracts-and-agreements/

        [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10407125/

        [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6490267/

        [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7426134/

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      • sudosysgen 3 days ago

        Lebanon has incredibly unreliable cell service. Anyone who needs to receive messages in a timely and reliable fashion would have no choice to have a pager or similar device. That would include many people in schools and most people in a hospital.

        > they don't all re-up from Iran all at the same time

        Who says anyone does? Hezbollah has 40k fighters, and we have reports of 2000 people being injured, so clearly Hezbollah, military or civilian, didn't "all re-up from Iran all at once", the numbers are more than an order of magnitude off for you to conclude as much.

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      • John23832 3 days ago

        You're pulling this out of thin air. You do not know this.

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    • luckylion 3 days ago

      This is such a strange take. As if CIA operatives and a random teacher at some elementary school just both reach into a box with pagers and pick one because they're both employed by the government.

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      • sudosysgen 3 days ago

        If the US government was sanctioned to the extent Hezbollah was, someone like an elementary school principal would most likely have to ask a higher-up to provide them with something like a pager, which would likely have been smuggled together with others.

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