they never had widespread non-internet-based telephony

telephones in the pokémon world are an extension of the LAN/WAN/Internet systems that they developed for pokémon transfers and PC access there was no predecessor system afaict

they just sent Mail by carrier pidgey

@Lady this seems implausible

@Satsuma why do you say so

@Satsuma are you incapable of imagining a modernity without telephones

@Lady telegraph actually

@Satsuma why

@Lady sending a live thing digitally is insanely complex and it seems unlikely that, even if it was ones top cultural priority, it would get invented before the ability to send any data even if the latter was not particularly widely implemented

@Satsuma i'm not saying pokémon teleportation precedes email but i don't think email necessitates telegraph

@Lady email is another reasonable predecessor technology and i’d also believe that lack of interest meant there wasn’t widespread the infrastructural accommodation necessary for a full telephone/internet/wired data network prior to teleporting pokemons

@Satsuma @Lady They do have radio.

Potentially the system only works by broadcast (including rebroadcast networks?), or at least unicast/multicast if it exists at all was only developed much later (e.g. to handle signal congestion from larger amounts of users)?

@Satsuma @Lady !!

The system being broadcast-based is why it is possible to fly to pokemon centers, which are all broadcast nodes.

It All Makes Sense™.

@Satsuma @Lady WAIT how does the Network Machine (from FR/LG) play into this!?

@gaditb @Satsuma Kanto uses Silph boxes and Hoenn uses Devon boxes and there are regional WANs but no protocol for communicating between them / which is compatible with both systems

that's the beginnings of the pokémon internet and probably one of the first routers

@gaditb @Satsuma so first they connect Sevii to Kanto, which is Silph-Silph, to see that it works (and avoid messy protocol specifications for conveying commands across systems) and then they connect Sevii to Hoenn, Silph-Devon, which requires protocol standardization for the whole transfer process on the host-router interface

@Lady @Satsuma Calling it a router presumes their network has been built up from unicast connections, though. (And I agree with Satsuma -- we'd expect more simple forms of unicast technologies first.)

I still think my "broadcast as a basic unit" theory deserves at least some consideration. (We see radio/TV, positioning systems, ... I think we have evidence for it.)

In that frame, it's an amplifier/rebroadcaster -- possibly, reencoding as well.