The old fashioned belt pagers that copier technicians used to wear. You could call a phone number and send a numeric or sometimes text message to the person’s pager. They were one-way, receive only, so the message would normally be your phone number and the person would go to a landline phone and call you. That was before everyone had mobile phones.
You can still get those pagers and the privacy attraction is that they don’t send anything like your location back to the phone carrier. Instead they are basically broadcast receivers, and the message is broadcast to your whole reception zone, typically the size of a city but potentially bigger on the fancier plans.
Service appears to start around $15/month per a quick search I just did. That’s more than I pay for unlimited voice and text plus a GB of data on my crappy MVNO cellular plan. So they aren’t that good a value for most of us in this day and age. But they do still exist.
POCSAG?
The old fashioned belt pagers that copier technicians used to wear. You could call a phone number and send a numeric or sometimes text message to the person’s pager. They were one-way, receive only, so the message would normally be your phone number and the person would go to a landline phone and call you. That was before everyone had mobile phones.
You can still get those pagers and the privacy attraction is that they don’t send anything like your location back to the phone carrier. Instead they are basically broadcast receivers, and the message is broadcast to your whole reception zone, typically the size of a city but potentially bigger on the fancier plans.
Service appears to start around $15/month per a quick search I just did. That’s more than I pay for unlimited voice and text plus a GB of data on my crappy MVNO cellular plan. So they aren’t that good a value for most of us in this day and age. But they do still exist.
More info available by web search.
Huh interesting. Thank you!