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A woman uses a mobile device while walking past a Telus store in Ottawa February 19, 2014. Telus Corp. is weeks away from shutting down its paging services.Chris Wattie/Reuters

Telus Corp. is weeks away from shutting down its paging services and the number of customers who still use the simple messaging technology has been dwindling for years.

But Garry Fitzgerald, the CEO of Canada's largest paging provider PageNet Canada Inc., says there will always be a core group of people who turn to paging, which is reliable in emergency situations and helpful for communicating short, critical messages to multiple recipients at once.

Mr. Fitzgerald said it has been more than a decade since Canada's national cellular providers were dominant in the paging business, which became a small sideline as their wireless divisions began to take off in the 1990s and grew rapidly over the past decade.

Telus, Rogers Communications Inc. and BCE Inc.-owned Bell Mobility have about 25.5 million cellular customers between them, while the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission estimated that as of 2013, there were just 161,500 subscribers to paging services. The commission said paging customers declined by 10.7 per cent per year on a compound basis since 2009. (BCE also owns 15 per cent of The Globe and Mail.)

PageNet is privately owned and does not disclose its subscriber numbers, but Mr. Fitzgerald says he believes the CRTC's figure underestimates the number of pager subscribers by more than 50 per cent. He said PageNet has more customers than all of Canada's other paging providers combined.

He admits that paging is not a growth industry but says those working in health care, law enforcement and first response will continue to use the messaging service.

"Paging, quite a while ago, stopped being an 'everybody' product," Mr. Fitzgerald said in an interview. "Those who really need it today tend to be not that group of real estate agents we might have seen a decade ago who used it as a beeper, but those who use it for more of a critical alerting device."

PageNet serves more than 500 hospitals and health care facilities in the province of Quebec alone, he said, and when it wins new contracts the company often goes into such facilities to install new network sites in areas where cellular signals typically could not be received. PageNet has between 600 and 800 network sites across Canada, he said.

The company also sells its technology for machine-to-machine applications such as the remote monitoring of large irrigation systems or for load-balancing by hydro-electric companies.

Like cellular services, paging uses radio spectrum to send signals across airwaves. But while wireless devices rely on what is often referred to as broadband communication, pagers use narrowband communication, which takes up a smaller frequency range.

The technology used for pagers can't send as much information as the broadband used for modern cellular voice and data services, but Mr. Fitzgerald said the narrowband protocol is "very robust and reliable."

Paging's other main advantage is that it operates on a simulcast basis, which means multiple transmitters send out the same signals at once. In contrast, cellular services tend to be based on a one-to-one relationship between the device and a cell tower, Mr. Fitzgerald said.

Telus plans to shut down its paging services, which it offers in parts of British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec, by the end of March.

"We've been communicating with our customers for the better part of a year, offering to either move them to another Telus service or refer them to another company continuing to offer paging services," spokesman Chris Gerritson said Monday.

The federal government sets the spectrum frequency that paging operates on and Mr. Gerritson said the company's paging licences expire on March 31 and Telus does not plan to renew them. "Paging service is not regulated and this spectrum would be available for anyone to apply for the licences to provide paging service."

The company has not disclosed the number of paging customers it has since 2001, when it had 217,000 users, but he said Telus customers now represent only a "fraction of the overall Canadian pager number."

Jacqueline Michelis, a spokeswoman for Bell, said demand for pagers has been in sharp decline, adding, "like mobile carriers worldwide, Bell is focused is on 4G LTE networks and smartphones."

However, Bell has no current plans to discontinue its service, she said. "We offer paging nationally, in partnership with other carriers, including Telus. As a result of their recent announcement we've been in touch with any affected customers and are working with them to provide alternatives."

A Rogers spokeswoman said the company also plans to continue to support pager services, which are used most by larger companies and the public sector.

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SymbolName% changeLast
BCE-N
BCE Inc
-0.58%34.2
BCE-T
BCE Inc
-0.64%46.31
RCI-N
Rogers Communication
-0.87%42.21
T-T
Telus Corp
-0.27%22.36

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