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/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.

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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.

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