Turn back the pages: Tokyo Telemessage to shut down Japan's last pager service in 2019

摘要

Japan's sole remaining paging service provider Tokyo Telemessage has announced it will close its service in September 2019, bringing the shutter down on five decades of paging services in the country. According to SoraNews24, Tokyo Telemessage is still delivering a paging service to around 1,500 subscribers in its service area, which covers Tokyo and several neighboring regions. However, the company has finally conceded that, amid the proliferation of mobile smartphones and other more advanced devices/ services, demand for pagers has ended. Japan first introduced communications services using pagers back in 1968, via Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corp, the predecessor of NTT Corp.