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Ask HN: Why did Hezbollah use pagers?

5 points by victorbjorklund ↗ HN
I have seen it mentioned several times that Hezbollah made a decision to stop using mobile phone because they are easy to track and instead they started using pagers. Is there any truth to this? What would be the technical explanation that a pager would be more secure than a locked-down phone?

7 comments

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neduma
and why walkie-takie? Must be related to cultural and cost effective measures.
DamonHD
I assume no centralised register and tracking of location, and thus of whoever has the device.
DamonHD
I assume that (most) pagers are still receive only, so cannot easily be tracked, for a start. (They were r/o when I last used one well over 20Y ago.)
Kon-Peki
We're on the 4th or 5th generation of mobile network standards. Each generation gets more optimized to allow for more devices, more data, more usage.

You simply cannot run a worldwide mobile network with a few billion phones unless you have a general idea of where every single phone is. So that is what happens. All the phones are constantly telling the network "if you need to contact me, please use these towers that I can currently see". That's how it has to work.

codingdave
In short, pagers do not use the cell network. They do not register themselves with cell towers, which means you cannot triangulate where they are.