Comment by jakeogh
8 years ago
/napkin overestimate using US 6B/calls/day with a nationwide 256B packet each, that's roughly a 100Mbps broadcast channel, which is ~5 digital TV channels, or one geostationary satellite's half-duplex bandwidth if it could see the entire US. As mdhardeman points out, it's easier than that, and there is plenty of room for re-transmission.
What is the passive bitrate of a tower->cell connection? LTE/GSM whatever.
With everyone's phones receiving and parsing that, batteries would die very quickly.
Pagers parse every single page. They only alert you when it's to your address. /napkin is just that, if you designed the protocol this would be very doable. The receiver can passively listen quite cheaply energy wise. This is nothing like decoding a video stream.
And ethernet and 802.11 receive every frame, whether it's addressed to the equipment or not.