As phones become a major communication tool, who are the people and entities that still use pagers?

With mobile phones becoming the world's primary communication tool, walkie-talkies known as pagers have largely become a thing of the past, with demand for them declining after peaking in the 1990s.

But these small electronic devices are still a vital means of communication in some areas such as healthcare and emergency services, thanks to their durability and long battery life.

"It's the cheapest and most efficient way to communicate with a large number of people in terms of sending messages that don't need a response," says a senior surgeon at a major British hospital, adding that pagers are widely used by doctors and nurses across the country's National Health Service.

“They are used to tell people where to go, when and why,” he explains.

Pagers made headlines Tuesday when thousands of devices used by Hezbollah members were simultaneously detonated across Lebanon, killing at least 12 people and wounding nearly 3,000.

A senior Lebanese security source and another source said that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad was the one who planted explosives inside these devices.

The UK’s National Health Service was using about 130,000 pagers in 2019, more than 10% of all pagers in the world, according to government data. More recent figures are not available.

Doctors working in hospital emergency departments carry these devices while on duty.

Many walkie-talkies can also send out a siren and then broadcast a voice message to groups so that entire medical teams are alerted at once to an emergency, says a senior NHS doctor. This is not possible with a mobile phone.