What is the difference between a wide area 1-way pager and an in-house pager?

Wide-area 1-way pagers are the type of pagers that have a phone number and/or email address linked to the pager, and the pager itself can work for many miles, or in multiple states, or even nationwide in areas that have paging coverage. These are the types of pagers that doctors use as well as anyone that needs a way for urgent notifications to get through.  They are called one-way pagers because they can only receive a message but cannot reply back to the message.  

There are one-way numeric pagers and one-way alphanumeric pagers. One-way numeric pagers are capable of receiving a numeric page that is sent using a telephone. Most commonly, this is simply a telephone number that your caller would like you to call them back at. Alpha-numeric pagers have their own email address. If somebody wants to send you a message that consists of words and/or numbers, they would simply email your pager.

Text messaging sometimes works, but not always and we do not recommend using text to the pager's phone number since it is not reliable. An alphanumeric pager would be required for a text to come through if it is going to come through at all. Again, we do not recommend using text; we recommend using email only.  You can however enter the complete email address of the pager into the "to" field of a text message and that should work. 

Common frequencies for wide area pagers are 929.6125, 929.9375, 929.6625 MHz. Compatible pagers must also be on the Flex protocol. 

In-house pagers are also 1-way but are the type of pagers that work in a building where there is a transmitter base, and the signal is sent from the base to the pagers within the building. These are commonly used with nurse call systems, assisted living facilities, nursing homes, offices, warehouses and restaurants. In-house pagers do not need to travel outside of the premises and do not have pager phone numbers or an email address linked to them.  They can, however, display a message if the pager is alphanumeric capable, in the event of a restaurant, they might just vibrate to let a server know that food is ready in the kitchen or that a table is ready so a patron at a restaurant knows to come to the host stand.   In-house pagers work on a different frequency range than most wide area pagers.

A common frequency range for in-house pagers is the 450-470 MHz range. 

Virtual Paging is when you get notified of pages through: