How to Select a Pager Service

A wide assortment of pager services is available. Be careful not to pay for features you don't want.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Pagers

1. Decide where and when you want your pager to work. Pager services now offer plans that can cover you nationwide or even worldwide, within a multistate region, in specific areas or on a temporary basis.

2. Determine whether you want the capability to send messages from your pager.

3. Decide if you want callers to be able to leave a voice message or just a phone number. Voice mail can prove convenient if you are out of range of the pager or you have turned the pager off when a call comes in.

4. Consider whether you want sports, news and financial information paged to you.

5. Contact the major pager service providers. Most of them, such as SkyTel and PageNet, have Web sites.

6. Find out if the pager service offers customer service 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

7. Investigate whether it offers 800-number access and a live operator who can take messages.

8. Determine if each plan the service offers is flexible. Make certain that there is a means for you to get undelivered or stored messages when your pager is within the service area.

9. Find out if the pager service offers hardware'that is, a pager unit'that enables you to access all of the features in your chosen plan.

Tips & Warnings

• Yearly plans are usually less expensive than month-to-month plans.

[vernk]

on 4/21/2009 and make sure they have a frequency that will actually send pages to the are you will be in. ie. lead encapsulated hospital departments. too us awhile to find ours

on 6/7/2007 Make sure that there are no hidden payments.