That is my favorite Wired article written by my favorite author at that time in my life, and right around the time when the internet started to gather steam, brings back a lot of nostalgia
Article text: https://www.wired.com/1994/02/mao-bell/
Full magazine scan: https://archive.org/details/eu_Wired-1994-02_OCR
“Even people who carry cellphones carry pagers, which confused me until I found out that most of the cellphones I was seeing aren’t really cellphones at all; they are CT2 phones, which are cheaper and operate over a much shorter range. On a CT2, you can call out but you can’t receive calls, so you have to carry a pager. To cover a metropolis with CT2, tens of thousands of base stations would be needed. Coverage in Shenzhen is still spotty. When you see half a dozen young men loitering on the front steps of a building shouting into their prawns, you know there must be a CT2 station inside.”
"Hey, how much does that satphone cost?"
"Who gives a shit?"