The end of the pager era is nigh in Japan after five decades as the country’s last provider yesterday announced that it would be scrapping its service next year.
Tokyo Telemessage Inc, the only pager service provider left standing, said it had decided to terminate its service to Tokyo and three neighboring regions in September next year — describing the development as “very regrettable.”
“Pagers were once a huge hit ... but the number of users is now down to 1,500,” the company said in a statement, adding that it had stopped manufacturing the hardware device 20 years ago.
Photo: AFP
Pagers — known in Japanese as poke-beru (“pocket bell”) — became popular in the 1990s, especially among high-school girls obsessed by the devices’ primitive text messaging functions.
At break time, long lines of high-school girls would form outside public phones as they frantically punched in numbers that were then converted into short messages to classmates and boyfriends.
At the 1996 peak for the technology, the number of users reached more than 10 million, according to government data, but mobile phones quickly consigned pagers to the technology dustbin.
Major telecoms firm NTT Corp, which introduced pagers back in 1968, stopped its service in 2007.
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