Beepers are big: sales of pagers are growing at almost 30 percent.

• Author: Prata, Kathleen

Pagers aren't just for doctors and construction workers anymore. Salesmen, executives, mothers, soon-to-be fathers and kids clip these units to their belts. There's even a story about a farmer who attached one to his lead cow and paged her to return to the barn at milking time.

True? Who knows. But Kevin Gleason, vice president and general manager for PageNet in Indianapolis, confirms that farmers do put pagers to other uses in their day-to-day activities.

"A lot of farmers are working aggressively with markets, especially when they're bringing crops in from the field," he says. "Some are leasing alphanumeric pagers, so they can sit in their combines for 12-hour days and still get messages."

Alphanumeric pagers display both numbers and words, up to 3,500 characters. Paging software, costing as little as $39.00, is necessary, along with a modem-equipped PC. Some answering services also provide alphanumeric paging services. The pagers cost about $200 to purchase, and rent at about $18, depending on the paging company.

Dan Long of Page America in Griffith says that the number of people using alphanumeric pagers is growing by the month, and now totals 6 percent to 7 percent of the paging population. "People are finding the need for it, especially companies and doctors," he says.

The most popular pagers are the digitals, which display only a telephone number. They account for 85 percent of the pagers in use today, according to Don Cochran, sales and marketing manager for Indiana Paging Network in Indianapolis.

But alphanumerics will become more popular soon, as they will be able to transmit greater amounts of data. "With things like the Newton message devices and other emerging technologies, the amount of data transmitted is growing, and it's also being transmitted at higher speeds," Cochran explains.

Sherry Sullivan, of Richmond Answering Service in Richmond, prefers an alphanumeric. "Personally I like the alphanumeric better because the service can actually page me and tell me what the call is about," she explains. "This tells me whether I need to return the call right away, or even exactly what the caller wants."

Overall, the industry has grown dramatically. In its 1993 Industry Performance Report, the Paging Leadership Association pegged growth at almost 30 percent per year. The trade association attributes the growth to an increasingly mobile society...