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.
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