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From the Hacker News Guidelines [1]: > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. The title of the article is "Plan Ahead for Phase Out of 3G Cellular Networks and Service", which seems accurate. The current post's title is "5G obsoletes 3G? forced obsolesence [sic] for profit?" [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Isn't it a bit early to shut down 4G LTE? Does everyone and everywhere have that access to 5G now?
What is your favorite thing that was built to last? This is, perhaps, a cheesy country song that speaks to the idea https://youtu.be/E4i2fC1U38s . Is "built to last" an obsolete notion?
Editorializing the headline like that is a no-go.
Newer phone networks are much more efficient than old ones. For a certain amount of 3G spectrum the carrier can serve more customers at higher data rates with 4G or 5G. From their viewpoint it is expensive to keep serving 3G customers.
Ironically 2g will still be around forever as a fallback and so much industrisl equipment relies on it At least thats what uk operators told me
Is there any way to fix my old 3G phone to continue to work under 5G?
So you would need:
- a new antenna
- a new modem
- a driver working with your CPU/OS, which is likely to not be the case
- a way to replace the parts
Sometimes the modem is part of the CPU package, making it impossible.
Driver limitations make it often even impossible to produce "the same phone but with just another modem", not even speaking about upgrading.
The best chance to update to 5G is in laptops where the modem is on a separate Bord, but even then you have the problem of firmware lock-down and interface incompatibilities.
"T-Mobile announced that it will finish shutting down Sprint's 3G CDMA network by March 31, 2022 and Sprint's 4G LTE network by June 30, 2022." Isn't it a bit early to shut down 4G LTE? Does everyone and everywhere have that access to 5G now?
We're lucky enough that the vast majority of our clients moved off of 3G in this last wave of fire alarm system updates or they went straight from land lines to LTE as the land lines become less commonly used.
The most annoying thing is the sheer volume of spam mail I get from 3G advocates trying to convince us to contact regulators to stop 3G sunsetting. I'm sorry angry emailer, but we've long since moved on just like we always have when a technology gets put to pasture.
I worked very very briefly in the wireless service industry on UAPs and large scale cell antenna receivers. To me, this doesn't seem as much a conspiracy to obsolete old phones as a practical stance to not need to have two copies of antennas on every tower. The old antennas used in 3G don't go up to the frequencies needed by true 5G, so they need new ones. If they're developing new ones, they don't want to have to ke…
Despite the positives, this feels kind of sad.
If you look at software, many of the older browsers out there can't even open simple modern webpages. After years, i grow weary of the churn, i've gone from Windows 98 to Windows 10 now, through numerous versions of Debian/Ubuntu and CentOS/Fedora, From Android 2.1 all the way to 10 currently. I have had software and even hardware be ripped out of my hands every few years, because someone decided to change something and deprecate the older stuff.
But what is the alternative? Use old and sadly insecure hardware/software? Or keep up with everything and partake in more consumerism than i should?
Just some musings on the topic, because watching Bryan Lunduke talk about old computers from another time when not everything old was considered "vulnerable" and "a risk" (due to not having much network capability at all) was interesting and enjoyable. I wonder what i'll be working with in 20 years and whether the older Debian and Windows XP versions will still hold a place in my heart.
Newer phone networks are much more efficient than old ones. For a certain amount of 3G spectrum the carrier can serve more customers at higher data rates with 4G or 5G. From their viewpoint it is expensive to keep serving 3G customers.
Ironically 2g will still be around forever as a fallback and so much industrisl equipment relies on it At least thats what uk operators told me
Newer generations increase the spectral efficiency, so more throughput can be supported on the same spectrum. So the operators tend to move spectrum from old to new generations.
This is not immediate and there are a lot of differences from one operator to the next: in an area with low demand it's more cost efficient to keep using the old hardware as much as possible for example, until at some point using new more efficient hardware is cheaper than maintaining the old one. Then there are contractual obligations: some 2G is kept around to support industrial M2M applications with contracts covering 10 to 15 years of service for example.
Which is why there's quite a lot of differences from operator to operator. Still, the trend is always there. What changes is the transition speed.