Some will say it's POTS. I did a quick search on Google and found this:


http://aquis.aquiscommunications.com/products/wireless-messaging.html
(no affiliation)

Pagers!

........ and what network(s) are pager messages sent through ??

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.

I wouldn't put to much emphasis on that specific report, especially considering the military comms systems that are avialable, from GPS broadcast communications through to C3I JT terminals to dedicated Internet infrastructure.

For the rest of us POTs is probably the most reliable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8lVXQfPXRw

Well, I've beaten the ever loving $%^& out of my work cell phone for the past 18mos and it still works. It's a phone/nextel direct-connect/accepts txts/accepts txt emails device. I carried a work pager for 9 years and broke more than my fair share of them.

I still have to ask how does a pager receive a short msg in the event of an emergency when my phone apparently will not. Bear in mind I no longer have a pager as its functions were folded into the single phone / nextel device.

I could plan on using for POTS for home only. For everywhere else, there has got to be other planning.

Regarding the idea that cell phones being able to do whatever a pager can do, I beg to differ. I expect my cell phone to last for no more than 24-hours at the most. A pager can last much longer. That may not seem like a big deal right now when we're warm and safe, but it could be a big deal in a large-scale disaster when you're out there.

Your cellular phone battery probably wouldn't be an issue. It would probably outlast the battery at the POTS exchange/cellular tower from the POTs telephone/cellular phone sending you the page message assuming a wide area power outage. Turning off/on every 30min etc to pick up SMS texts will greatly increase the life of the cell phone for 1-2 weeks.

This was a lesson learned for me from our last hurricane. A falling tree took out the power. No problem, my generator kicked in. After a number of hours, I lost POTS, DSL (internet) and cell phone (no signal).

I later found that nearby there is a small, unattended building that contains various phone switching and DSL equipment; our community is serviced by this mini-facility. It has battery power back up. When the batteries there died, there went my POTS, DSL and cellphone. I am not sure why the cell phone went out, but I am guessing that there was signal switching equipment in that building that routed the calls going to and from the actual tower (located some distance away).

This small building was thus a single critical node for 3 communications mediums, all dependent on the same local power and battery backup. The phone company got in, set up a 5KW portable generator and got all 3 back at the same time and (mostly) kept it up with this generator until the power came back.

A lot of our planning on back-ups make the (unstated) assumption that they are independent systems. I wonder how many of these shared single node failure points there are, and how we can find them. I am still trying to figure a way around this failure node.

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.

Here is my current setup for communications;



A VOIP phone (standard POTS phone) works over a Vigor 2100 Wireless VOIP cable router to a Cisco 2100 cable modem (cheapest 10Mb/s connection service). If the cable service goes down I could replace the Cisco 2100 with an ancient USR8000 + D-link DFM-56OE 56k modem for dial up connection (assuming that POTS service is still avialable). I will have to experiment to see if I can get a shared wireless 56K connection (typically 40Kb/s) and a working VOIP phone connection over dial up connection.

Going back to the year 2000/2001 this was my portable 2G email/SMS/WAP setup. Most of the paging network in the UK was shut down around 2004/6 in the UK.



What is interesting is that Palm at the time also produced a dial up modem attachment, which allowed dial connection over POTS, which is something even the iPhone 4S doesn't have available today.

http://www.amazon.com/Palm-10401U-PalmOn...0669&sr=1-1

So if all the networks go down (POTS, GSM, 3G etc) then I will have to just rely on getting information via Short Wave, DAB FM, DVB-T and DVB-S.