Text Pager

pager that accepts short text messages (max 140chars) (exact same limit as SMS?)

Verizon's Text Pager network was bought last year by American Messaging, so there's only 1 big national player.

Coverage can be variable enough that most buildings that focus on in-building paging (e.g. an ALF) rely on having their own Pager Transmitter. This means (a) you can't page a staff person off-campus, and (b) you often can't page a person in the building from outside (e.g. via SMTP)!

You can also try sending SMTP Text Messaging to a Cell Phone, but that's not great either.

And you never get a failure message in any of these cases.