Comment by tptacek
People still use pagers for specialty purposes, like being on call in disaster zones, or serving as a parallel armed forces in a country with a hostile neighbor who has infiltrated your cell phone network.
I've said this like 5 times on this thread and feel bad for continuing to repeat myself, but: Hezbollah operates its own telecommunications network. The Hezbollah pagers probably do not work on the normal Lebanese telecoms systems. This in addition to the fact that Hezbollah procures pagers for its service members; it does not go to the Cricket Wireless store at the corner of Mousa al Sadr and Kouds and pick them up retail a couple at a time.
Pagers don't use normal telecom systems, and they're not limited to paramilitary organizations. They're very useful in any critical application because they have low infrastructure requirements.
The comment you're replying to explains how they're used routinely in most hospitals in the world for this purpose.
You can't buy pagers off stores on the corner, either. They don't have SIM cards and most of them can't report back to the network, so they need to be pre-configured by the network operator. Just the same way, if you work at a hospital and are issued a pager, it will be issued to you by your employer and you won't be able to pick it up off the street.
In a country with extremely unreliable telecom infrastructure, it's not at all unlikely for an organization to use pagers, especially if it operates emergency services, and they would have to be procured through that organization.