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I hope there's some broadcast stuff planned (does cellular support multicast like that?). So I can just point my phone at the sky and get some news/weather/traffic updates "off-line". Maybe a radio station or two? It's pretty impressive what can fit into 32kbps (or less!) these days.

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Yes, that's how SMS emergency alerts work

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_Broadcast

> is part of the 2G, 3G, 4G LTE (telecommunication) and 5G standards

Interesting as Canada's system only works on LTE or higher (we still have 3G here).

I camped on 3G for a while because they kept sending out Amber Alerts at the "Presidential" level for custody disputes. Gov repeatedly denied any issue but haven't sent any for a while. Either people stopped "abducting" their own kids or they changed their threshold-to-blast.

Was your 3G on CDMA2000 rather than the 3GPP UMTS/WCDMA/HSDPA standards? That could account for the difference

One of our two big networks was, the other was not.

Viasats service supported this via USB plug in drive on the modem to load some content. Don't think it was released out of beta.

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