As a historical point, that's interesting. But I don't think that's a very practical suggestion going forward.

I was a big fan of pagers and kept using a numeric pager as my main personal mobile point of contact while I lived in NYC long after most of my friends got mobile phones, but let's not forget the era when 9/11 happened. Even I had switched to a mobile phone when 9/11 happened.

Mobile networks weren't quite as well built out at that point and therefore had fewer towers and less overall capacity. Text messaging was still a rarity back then. I used Voicestream (which later became T-Mobile), which was the only GSM carrier and could do SMS natively. Europeans were already texting like crazy back then on their mobile phones but not Americans.

I don't recall if the analog, TDMA, and CDMA carriers like AT&T and Sprint could even do text messaging back then. Two-way pagers were popular, especially with the youth market. Oh, and Nextel was still big back then, and push-to-talk was all the rage among a mostly blue collar set.

There was also still a large pager transmitting network in place at that time. Many of those companies are gone now and I'm sure many of those transmitters are also gone. Motorola doesn't even make pagers anymore.

So, times have changed. I'm afraid that the pager infrastructure is not as robust as it once was. I did appreciate that a pager signal would reach me even when I would be in the bowels of old concrete and steel NYC skyscrapers while everyone with a mobile phone could not get a signal at all on their cell phones.