In a major emergency ... cell phones out, cables cut, repeaters down, internet down. A LOT of citizens are going to be feeling very uncomfortable in that situation. Suddenly our "wired-in" world is completely gone.

I just went thru this with my 8-year old in L.A....write a simple message about where people are going, and pin it to the wire netting fence near the main gate.

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.

AFLM, Will your setup continue to work with no power? During last months power outages, cordless phone, or anything requiring power from the grid, stopped working.

If this all fails then its time to go down the pub.

You have a POTS phone pictured, but it's VOIP service (not POTS service). You did mention you could dial-up on a POTS service, but do you keep your POTS service active? I don't.

I can see how pagers can be the most reliable means of communication for the average person walking around away from home. A pager is easy to EDC and the battery lasts for months, not days or hours. A pager takes a cell phone's most reliable communication means (text/email/SMS) and specializes in those departments in a device that is more rugged than a cell phone. A pager has no congestion issues. It just needs a quick burst of connectivity. Of course, the recipient needs to be communicating with text/email/SMS.

On the mountains I snowboard, I think I'll try communicating with pagers. Walkie Talkies are usually worthless.