Over the last couple of months, I've started tinkering with old gadgets again - the result being that I'm now considering approaching this pager project in a different, more 'purist' way.

I recently discovered that you can still rent a proper (that is, POCSAG) tone pager in the UK, for about £6/month. By 'tone pager' I mean a pager that just beeps when someone calls it - no numeric/alphanumeric messages involved. These pagers run on the PageOne network, which is the only wide-area POCSAG paging network remaining in the UK, after Vodafone shut theirs down back in 2018.

Tone pagers have various obvious, and less obvious, limitations:

(a) you don't know who called you, unless only one person has your pager number

(b) if they called you from a mobile, they might face financial ruin (calls to pagers on O2 pay-as-you-go now cost £1.50 per minute!)

(c) if you're out of range, or your pager is switched off, you'll never get the message.

To eliminate these issues, I had the idea to combine one with Twilio. It should be quite easy to rent a Twilio mobile number (about 90p/month) and implement a flow like this in Twilio Studio:

person rings Twilio mobile number (eliminating problem b) -> Twilio voicemail takes message (eliminating problems a/c) and forwards to email -> caller ends call -> Twilio rings pager number -> pager beeps -> user checks Twilio voicemail when they're next at an email client to hear the message.

You could implement an even simpler flow for receiving SMS messages: user texts Twilio mobile number -> Twilio forwards SMS to my personal email -> Twilio calls pager.

A bit of a faff, perhaps, but an interesting idea...I currently carry a seldom-used Nokia phone around (basically for dire emergencies) and I can't decide whether a cloud-activated pager would be more, or less, futuristic than that.