Verizon Indefinitely Delays 3G Network Shutdown (lightreading.com) 61
Verizon has backtracked on its plan to turn off its 3G network by the end of 2020. Light Reading reports: In response to questions from Light Reading, Verizon spokesperson Kevin King said "our 3G network is operational and we don't have a plan to shut it down at this time. We'll work with customers to move them to newer technology." That's a decided change from Verizon's plans from roughly a year ago. In July 2019, Verizon spokesperson Howie Waterman confirmed to Light Reading that the operator had delayed the shuttering of its 3G network from the end of 2019 to the end of 2020. He said the action would give impacted customers "an extra year to decide what they want to do." Verizon's decision to keep its 3G network up and running means the service provider will continue to operate three separate wireless network technologies -- 3G, 4G and 5G -- for the foreseeable future. As for the other carriers, AT&T plans to shutter its own 3G network in "early" 2022 and T-Mobile has said it will shut down its 3G network "over the next several years" but "we haven't shared timing."
spectrum (Score:4, Interesting)
3G spectrum is large for what it delivers
shut it down and move on...
the problem is the safety devices e.g. "Toyota has begun warning some customers that its "Safety Connect" services in North America, including collision notification and roadside assistance, will no longer work after Nov. 1, 2022"
so at least someone looked at the contracts they signed...
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shut it down and move on...
Indeed. 4G has been available for a decade. Everyone has had more than enough time to replace their obsolete phones.
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shut it down and move on...
Indeed. 4G has been available for a decade. Everyone has had more than enough time to replace their obsolete phones.
How about their obsolete cars?
Re:spectrum (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not Verizon's fault that the automakers didn't demand easily swappable radio modules from their suppliers, who certainly could have delivered such. They could have been USB, FFS.
Re:spectrum (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a Verizon customer and I drive from Boston to Miami every few months along I95. For 20% of the trip I get 4G service. For 10% of the trip I get no service. And for the remaining 70% I get 3G service. I only get 4G service in urban areas. The spans between cities are 3G only. What is going to happen if they turn off 3G? Will I have no service for 80% of the trip?
Re: spectrum (Score:2)
In short, yes.
Hopefully they instead just drop some bands. Then if your radio still supports the remaining band[s] you may still get coverage.
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How about their obsolete cars?
That is self evidence from the adjective you put infront of cars. The car will still function. The services behind them on the other hand are precisely what you can expect from an attempt to hold on to something outdated.
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I'd be more concerned about things like IoT wireless monitors for things like refrigerator trucks or shipping containers.
I'll bet that more than a few companies will be scratching their heads why the monitors they've come to rely on suddenly stop working after a decade or so.
Re:spectrum (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't about mom and pop wanting to keep their flip phone from 2005.
There are a TON of non-consumer devices that are 3G. Point of Sale devices for one, particularly the mobile payment systems. Shipping/delivery systems as well. Neither of which is a matter of walking into a brick and mortar and pointing at a new phone on the wall.
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particularly the mobile payment systems
Any payment system that required a hardware swap for chip and pin should have required a hardware swap that included at least 4G.
Re:spectrum (Score:4, Informative)
Hey, city dweller! Not all of us live in the city. My nifty 5G phone only gets a 2G signal at my house.
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I thought all the big US carriers had already shut down 2G, but it looks like only AT&T did. Verizon's 2G is tied into its 3G because 3G and below is all CDMA for them. T-Mobile hasn't formally announced the end of 2G (there was a leaked memo but no formal announcement), and Sprint was planning to shut down its CDMA network (including 2G) at the end of 2021 before the merger, so who knows what that schedule is now.
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2G? I have never seen that on iDevices like iPhones and iPad air. I have seen 1X, 3G, and 4G LTE.
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Ah. Thanks. 1X/2G is crazy slow.
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Maybe a bunch of classified (but still illegal) government surveillance equipment still uses 3G.
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shut it down and move on...
Indeed. 4G has been available for a decade. Everyone has had more than enough time to replace their obsolete phones.
Environmental considerations aside, a sizable number of mobile device owners know all they need/want is a basic, simple, dumb mobile telelphone. While a life-style choice for some, for others of limited financial means (many among the elderly, the socially marginalized, those with long-term medical conditions, etc) a cheap basic prepaid phone may be the only affordable option. Bonus: basic phones tend to have a much longer working lifespan, compared to their "higher functioning" cousins. Even today, a few c
Re:spectrum (Score:5, Interesting)
reduce the spectrum for 3G to 5MHz (Score:4, Informative)
this actually makes some sense and they have done that in Germany on the 2100MHz band 1
And... (Score:5, Informative)
There is a *lot* of monitoring gear that works on 3G. Cell based burglar and fire alarms, police GPS trackers and ankle bracelets, commercial GPS vehicle tracking systems, supply chain tracking gear. A lot still depends on 3G, and the unit replacement cost is very high.
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Our residential alarm company replaced the modem on our system at the end of 2019, moving from a 2G or 3G to a 4G, but I expect a lot of alarm systems aren't getting that kind of proactive care.
Burgler (Score:2)
Our residential alarm company replaced the modem on our system at the end of 2019, moving from a 2G or 3G to a 4G, but I expect a lot of alarm systems aren't getting that kind of proactive care.
When we had our alarm system installed in 2004, it came with a 2G modem. In our area 2G was discontinued in 2012, and the company replaced it with a 3G modem, which seemed weird to me as 4G had been out for a few years already. I'm guessing the alarm companies buy the modems in bulk and install them until they are gone.
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Yeah, our alarm needed a modem upgrade as well - they came and replaced it for free with an LTE unit.
That was nice for us, but plenty of residential and commercial properties use a third party monitoring service that doesn't provide equipment support, so they'd be looking at a $300+ spend to buy the appropriate modul
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Ours is a local affiliate of Alarm.com, so still very much in business. Considering switching to SimpliSafe or something like that, but I'm kind of lazy about it.
It's because 5G sucks for signal strength (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's because 5G sucks for signal strength (Score:4, Insightful)
WRONG WRONG WRONG!!! You (along with most other people it would seem) are confusing a radio access technology (that is, modulation) with the millimeter wave radio bands, or even just the shorter centimeter bands. 5G is currently enabled on T-Mobile USA's Band 71 AKA old UHF TV and has plenty of range, but there's enough people on it now that the low available bandwidth is being strained, so people blame 5G. It's not.
The real reason this happened is because there is too much M2M (Machine to Machine) and IoT on this band and they already screamed about the cost when they were forced to move from 2G (GSM & CDMA) a couple years ago. You can't be "The Business Network" and not cater to businesses especially in this pandemic.
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But 5G has the same range as 4G when used on the same frequencies. 5G introduces additional higher frequencies as an option for locations where client density is high and more throughput is needed, but you don't have to use the additional frequencies.
The shorter range of higher frequencies is actually a benefit and is the main reason we want to have the option of using them: to allow packing more cells into the same area, since total throughput scales with the number of cells.
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You're getting 5th generation confused with 5GHz, or just misunderstanding that most of the spectrum used for 5G was not ideal (except T-Mobile, who has 3 separate bands). 5G encompasses both high frequency / high density applications, and low frequency / low density applications.
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Just like I've been saying for a couple years now, 5G just means lower signal strength for all the places that barely get 4G.
It means absolutely nothing of the sort. The signal strength and coverage for 5G is slightly better than 4G on a comparable frequency. The fact that 5G also works in higher frequency bands does not justify your misinformed claim.
Car Owners Rejoice (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Car Owners Rejoice (Score:5, Insightful)
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You get that by buying the base model, installing a stereo with a fat screen, and ignoring the crap built into the car.
Bonus points for severing any antennas included by the manufacturer so they can't be used against you.
Some cars, of course, aren't designed to accommodate an aftermarket stereo.
Don't buy those. They only encourage bad behavior.
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Just swap a new receiver into the car. If its not upgradeable you should not have expected it to last more than several years in the first place.
Among most vehicle owners, there is little awareness the ability to swap/replace any vehicle components, including sound systems, has disappeared. Huge numbers of them are not gong to be happy when faced with the need to replace vehicles, due to loss of required reporting functionanitly, very shortly after (or even before) extended warranties expire. Good to remember: unlike smart-phones, the term for vehicle extended warranties is often 5, or even 7, years. A very few are 10 years. Even if those warrantie
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Let's not have the cell companies mask their bad design decisions. It's not like the car will stop driving. They just advertised a feature with planned obsolescence inside.
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Scum Sucking Bottom Feeders (Score:1)
The title is a polite translation of what I really wanted to say.
We received a note in DECEMBER that they were going to shut down their network as of December 31, 2020. We went to the Verizon store to replace my wife's perfectly functional 3G phone to ensure that she did not have a service interruption. We had a terrible in-store experience, received no discounts, spent $300 to replace the phone, paid a new phone activation fee, and now, after the shutdown deadline, they announce they are keeping the ser
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We received a note in DECEMBER that they were going to shut down their network as of December 31, 2020. We went to the Verizon store to replace my wife's perfectly functional 3G phone to ensure that she did not have a service interruption. We had a terrible in-store experience, received no discounts, spent $300 to replace the phone, paid a new phone activation fee, and now, after the shutdown deadline, they announce they are keeping the service live.
Scum sucking bottom feeders
Congratulations, by giving them that $300 you just helped fuck it up for everyone else. You could have got an unlocked phone online and brought it to their network, they are not picky. You just slap the SIM in and go, if the phone supports the right bands. Or you could have jumped networks, you can take your phone number with you. Instead you just rewarded them for being assholes. Guess what lesson that teaches them?
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It's like a going out of business sale. If it's successful, they can remain in business.
They can shrink the spectrum size requirements for the remaining 3G for the low-bandwidth, non-phone devices that were never going to be replaced anyway and make room for more 5G spectrum. They can't say that, so they have to make it sound like it applies to everyone.
They saw you coming. (Score:2)
-Research.
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I was suspicious that the deadline would be extended, but also didn't want to wait until the last minute. I kept an old flip phone for battery life and range to support travel and professional on-call. It was 10 years ol
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The phone was a 4 year old rugged flip phone. So even though you believe the original purchase was unlikely, it happened. We got exactly the same features on the new phone, which are exactly what she needs. My wife is visually impaired, and cannot use a typical smartphone. She has no use for email, FM, GPS, or any other advanced features. She has never had the need for longer battery life and has never failed to connect a call. $300 is an unreasonable price for a purchase that turned out to be unnecessa
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Yeah, we probably both got the Kyocera XV. I already had a 4G plan with Verizon, so the new phone rolled neatly into it for $20/month for service (same as the old phone).
If you got something in writing that service was going to be shut down in December, and were sold an unnecessary phone under what you reasonably believe were false pretenses, you might want to at least lodge
This sounds a bit scary for me... (Score:1)
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Most Android phones only show you what you initially connect to,such as 4G. Yet, in fact many times it drops that 4G and falls back to 3G.
Every Android phone I've ever used going back to Gingerbread shows you what technology you are using right now, updated in realtime (because it only has to update when you switch, this is cheap.)
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I don't know what network you are on, but T-Mobile has a slice of 600MHz for their 5G. Not high bandwidth unless there's nobody using it, but at least reliable over longer distances.
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The question is whether the problems with LTE range (and they are significant in many places) are caused by the modulation, the frequency range, or something else.
One possibility is that by opening up some of those lower frequency bands for LTE (850 MHz for Verizon and AT&T, 800 MHZ for Sprint/T-Mobile), the LTE range may improve.
Unfortunately, it looks like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile are already using some of the 700 MHz band for LTE, and Sprint is already using some of the 850 MHz band. That pre
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LTE compatibility bigger problem than it seems (Score:3)
I'm almost certain AT&T will eventually be forced to abandon the 2022 time frame.
Most everyone's phones have LTE and while Internet will continue to work once 3G is shutdown a huge subset of these won't be able to make simple phone calls because phones either don't support VoLTE or are administratively barred by carriers. This only works now because the devices are switching to 3G to complete the call.
It would be a bit like shutting down IPv4 Internet and then realizing there is no IPv6 DNS glue holding it together.
There are relatively new phones released within the last year that would not work if the switch happened today. Carriers like AT&T are resorting to whitelisting devices and forcing vendors to meet their demands or else no VoLTE.
3G (Score:1)
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$30/year? In 2020?
I got my first POTS line when I was a teenager in the 1990s at around $20/month. That was a no-frills line so I would stop hogging the family telephone and could get on the modem whenever I wanted. In 2020 dollars, that's about $35/month. It was the same kind of land line that a lot of seniors had (at the time) since they might not be using "fancy" features like Called ID, call waiting, and other crap.
Today you can get a basic Straight Talk plan for like $30/month, and there are cheaper
Here's an idea... (Score:3)