Comment by tptacek
Comment by tptacek 3 days ago
People who work in schools in Lebanon carry smartphones like everybody else. Pagers are obsolete. Some doctors may carry them because they work when the cell network is down, but they don't all re-up from Iran all at once. Hezbollah carries pagers because they're one-way devices that are hard to track, which is not a problem a Lebanese school teacher has with his Chinese Android phone.
What makes you think pagers are obsolete? When I worked at a big-three cloud provider (2016) we used them and it was a great fit for on-call requirements. I regularly find I don't have cell service when in large buildings, out in the woods, or even just random spots in US cities. The pager didn't have those issues, and helped us build highly available services. Does Fly use something different for on-call alerts?
A quick search shows the US Government/Army [1] and hospitals use them [2] [3] [4]. I'm not familiar with Lebanese wireless networks, but pagers are certainly still used for these use-cases in the US.
"Residents reported that they used one-way pagers for work-related communication more often than smartphones" (2018)
[1] https://gov.spok.com/contracts-and-agreements/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10407125/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6490267/
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7426134/