09-06-2020, 09:12 AM
(09-05-2020, 07:45 PM)bcnaz Wrote: This 'may require' a separate carrier service to implement...?It would. You would have your normal cell carrier and service from a paging company. You would have your cell carrier set to forward all incoming calls to the paging company or if they support it, just forward calls when your phone is out of range, which is what it would look like to them when the modem was powered down.
If this became popular, i.e. adopted by a major phone hardware maker, cell companies would sign agreements with paging companies and bundle it on "privacy enhanced" service plans with different levels of paging service (local, regional, national) included. Done right your phone could know the paging coverage map and switch between paging and normal cell service as needed.
The primary reason this doesn't exist is the cell carriers saw no demand for it and lots of profitable upside from LoJacking every customer. We have to push back, reclaim our privacy. In reality, if there were demand or government pressure, the cell towers themselves could probably do this. Just broadcasting "paging" signal across all the towers in an area wouldn't suck up too much of their total bandwidth. Given a choice between that or paying a fee to a paging company, there would only need to be a couple percent of customers willing to pay a premium to make them modify the cell standards to capture that revenue stream.