Was going to ask how common pagers were, but suppose still used by emergency services etc and especially in warzones of questionable cell network reliability
Assuming you aren't joking: Pagers are receive-only, which is why they'd use them in preference to cellphones, which transmit even when just idling to register on cells.
This has not been true for some time. Pagers attach to a network in the same way a cell phone does. It is true they are more reliable in the receive only sense, as they can receive the broadcast message in the area they last attached to and the acknowledgment is not required to see the message but they do indeed transmit.
Although, if I was an intelligence agency or police force, I’d definitely give pagers a second look, right? Like they have uses but somebody picking a pager over a cellphone is doing something unusual—maybe something unusual and good, like running an emergency services organization, but still unusual enough to take a second look.
