I work in the Fire Industry, we've been selling LTE communicators for fire panels like hotcakes these last few years. Mostly due to so many sites not having good enough internet connections for IP-DACTs, or IT refusing to deal with fire alarm panels on their networks like putting us on a VLAN and giving us access to the outside world. I understand their hesitancy, but so many panels have built in IP communication with useful features 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.
Even if it cost nothing to upgrade you would have industry trade groups shouting from the rooftops on how terrible this is and how bad 4G is. In a previous job that required PCI compliance not even the threat of losing the ability to process credit cards would stop these trade groups.
A lot of people in car forums are super upset about this and angry with their specific automaker. But of course, it is happening to all of them that haven't moved off of 3G.
A few years back I got a handful of letters about getting my Nissan LEAF's radio updated from 2g to 3g. They wanted to charge me $200 USD for it. I didn't bother and it's ended up resulting in very little change for me - Mostly features I didn't really use.
It's nice to know what just a few years later I'd be facing the same problem again.
In the Leaf's case, anyone with your VIN (ie anyone who can walk up to you car and look through the windshield) could turn on your car's AC over the internet and run the battery down. Whoops.
I've been told that on my Subaru, if I subscribe to the services that need it, they will do the upgrade for free. But if I don't subscribe, they won't do it at all. I'm fine with that, I am unreasonably against subscriptions, lol.
This reminds me of all the 90s luxury cars with analog cellular phones integrated into the center consoles quickly becoming useless in the 2000s. Except worse considering how much these systems are integrated into some cars.
Not to be dumb - but I don't want my car to have cellular connectivity, so this opens up more car purchase options for me once 3G goes dark. Granted, that's a tiny influx of new customers, but still, there's at least 1 new customer as result of their decision to still use 3G.
In the EU new cars now are mandated to have an automatic way to call the emergency services after a crash, I wonder if the governments have a clause about what would happen if 3G is turned off (I guess they're not planning to do that for a while yet).
If I were in power and I genuinely cared about saving the planet, I'd figure out how to make cars without this auto-emergency-dial system more expensive to insure; that way, people would look at newer cars more favorabily, and I'd incentivize electric cars as well. But hey, luckily the car lobby is still pretty strong in the France and Germany!
Why use such an indirect and backwards method? If you were in power, you could just tax non-green cars, rather than promote cars that become useless in 5 years when technology moves on.
It's a balance between doing what you want and screwing people hard enough to get voted out or violently deposed (transition mechanism depends on the system of government in question).
Sure, but second point is that it's dumb to assume "smart" or "connected" cars are more green. If they are being obsoleted much faster than "dumb" cars, then whether or not they are electric makes little difference in the grand scheme of things.
3G has been mainstream in the US since the mid 2000s. Granted it depends on when you purchase your car, but getting almost 20 years out of the technology is pretty good. Most cars will be scrap after that long. I'm not sure where you came up with 5 years.
Did you miss that cars are still being made that are 3g-only? And I’d be willing to bet that cars didn’t have 3g modems until long after 3g was first available.
> 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?"
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 keep supporting old standards as well, so they don't code for it (and possibly don't even support it in the hardware). So now there are no more 3G receivers on any towers and therefore your 3G phone stops working. As a side effect, anyone still using a 3G device needs to buy a new one, but I don't think that is the main driver for the move.
> As a side effect, anyone still using a 3G device needs to buy a new one, but I don't think that is the main driver for the move.
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.
> someone decided to change something and deprecate the older stuff
I definitely understand the pain. In some cases, it's stupid moves. In other cases, it's about reclaiming the resources for something better. With wireless, should a small number of people who want to use old devices mean that we can't use those wireless frequencies for newer high-speed data? Maybe carriers should start pricing based no how much bandwidth you're using in terms of frequencies. Well, you're using a device that is 1/10th as efficient as a modern device so we're charging you many times more than what we charge customers with modern devices.
Sometimes there's inefficient stuff that impacts whether others can enjoy what they want.
> But what is the alternative?
The alternative is that we decide that new stuff (possibly progress) isn't something we want. I say possibly progress because some stuff is questionably progress. Do we need YouTube, TikTok, online games, etc? No, but they can surely be nice. We could certainly go back to the days of 2GB wireless plans and live like that. Heck, we lived without wireless data for a long time.
With some of the software churn, it just becomes hard to support so many different configurations and people concentrate on the ones that are commonly used.
> keep up with everything and partake in more consumerism than I should
Some of it is consumerism. Some of it is progress. I think you're slightly unfairly conflating it all as consumerism. The ability to offer unlimited data plans and faster data speeds is progress over slow, limited data plans. The problem you're facing is that everyone else changes and you don't see the point of it. Imagine everyone started speaking NewEnglish. You might see nothing wrong with English and it's not like English no longer works, but given that everyone else has changed, it no longer works for what you want - communicating with others around you.
Realistically, this is part of living in a civilization. You have to go along with what the civilization is doing and what will interface with them. This isn't even a modern phenomena in some ways. You talk about having an old computer that you want to be able to interface with others safely (view modern web pages, keep running software, etc). I'm now thinking of the Reformation where literally if you didn't adopt the new religion you might be killed. That's an extreme example, but there's a lot that people must do to be a part of our civilization.
Humans are social beings and our technology is no less social. It's why people have fights over things like programming languages. If PHP is a "dead language" it means that the next generation of engineers won't learn it and it will become less useful over time because fewer people will be improving it, writing libraries for it, and fewer systems will support it well. If a lot of people leave Android for iOS, there will be fewer apps for Android, fewer device options, etc. It's why people have fights over which next-gen console will win - because if they pick the losing device, they might not get a lot of games. I mean, if you bought a Dreamcast, you ended up buying something that never realized its potential because of the social context where game devs didn't make enough games for it.
Our technology is social. If you're not going along with that social context, you're going to miss out on things. In a certain way, you want everyone to support what you like even if it doesn't make sense for them (in terms of time and money).
Again, I understand the pain and there is a lot of consumerism. However, there's also progress in the mix as well. As the social context of the tech changes, you have to keep up with it to an extent. Companies don't want to keep supporting a 20-year-old OS because a few people don't see the need for the new features introduced in newer versions. Should you pay for a support contract for the old OS you want updates for? How expensive should that be given how few people will be paying for the engineering time to make that happen? Likewise, if 3G users want to keep their network around, how much should they pay for their plans to compensate for the fact that they're using a much greater share of a scarce resource (wireless spectrum)? $500/mo rather than $50/mo? It kinda gets to the point that it's realistically impossible since someone isn't going to pay $500/mo instead of upgrading their phone. Likewise, you aren't going to pay thousands per year for a support contract on an obsolete OS.
Cell phones and mobile devices in general have always been disposable items with limited expected lifespans. Instead of worrying about keeping obsolete devices working we should focus on clean disposal and recycling that minimizes waste and pollution.
Keep in mind, the thread you've replied in is related to 3G modems on fire alarm panels. Critical safety infrastructure isn't the same as the latest smart gadget. As we've moved to putting modems on more infrastructure, it's something to keep in mind.
I'm sure we'll see more of this post-5G. There's such a huge push to get 5G-connected IoT devices into every corner of society, we'll have to seriously reconsider how limited the lifespans of these technologies should be.
> Cell phones and mobile devices in general have always been disposable items with limited expected lifespans.
I agree with your second point, but I want to push back on this first point a bit. While it seems like manufacturers benefit from devices being disposable, I don't see a strong reason why they should be.
The reality is that extending the lifespan of devices is one of the best ways to lower consumption. When it comes to changes like retiring 3G, we also have to weigh that against the environmental cost of maintaining the 3G network. Given the maintenance impact, it may end up being a net positive to retire these devices, but it's still an important cost to consider.
To be clear, we should also improve disposal and recycling, but that shouldn't be to the exclusion of reducing and reusing.
I see a very strong reason. It’s not lifespan that matters, it’s attention span.
You could build a device with a 1000 year lifespan, but it’s a waste of effort if the consumer wants a new one after 5 years. It’s optimal to build a device with a lifespan that will only be as long as a consumer’s interest in it.
Cell phones and mobile devices in general have always been disposable items
Only if you define "always" as post-2010.
Cell phones were for a very long time considered long-term purchases, along the lines of washing machines and refrigerators. It was only when they became fashion accessories and certain companies started relying on pushing out new models every year for no reason other than to boost the balance sheet that they became "disposable."
You're right about the recycling, though. We need more places to recycle e-waste.
I was surprised a couple of years ago when I wanted to recycle an old PowerBook. I assumed that every Apple Store would take used gear. But it turned out that none of the Apple Stores near me would take it. I'd have to drive it four hours away to another city in order for it to be recycled.
That's simply wrong. In the US at least, prior to 2010 cell phones were typically replaced about every 3 years. The Motorola Razr flip phone was absolutely a fashion accessory in 2004; watch some music videos from that era. Motorola and other brands did push out new models every year.
They were already disposable items in 1999 when I got my first GSM phone. Every other year carriers would push you to upgrade to the latest and greatest with "free phone with contract extension" to get you onto the hot new technologies like WAP, color screens, cameras, MMS, 3G video calling, etc.
> It was only when they became fashion accessories
Nokias with Xpress-on covers were totally a fashion accessory! And there was always that d-bag with a Vertu phone.
I think "security" is used as a crutch and an excuse too much.
As a retro hardware enthusiast, very often the hardware isn't insecure. It's just that someone somewhere got lazy or greedy or both and decided to do something that makes the hardware not work right anymore. Things like billion-dollar game companies that shut down servers that cost them all of $5,000 a year to run. It's less than is spent on a single coffee maker, but the company decides to cut off all of its existing customers because they only number in the hundreds, not the millions.
As to "security" — Keeping financial records on a 1982 TRS-80 is far more secure than keeping them on any modern laptop.
Sure the server hardware itself might cost only $5,000 a year, but it can't just be left there on its own forever, as seen with the ongoing log4j vuln. Either it costs that much and puts their entire network at risk, or it costs a lot more due to engineering costs for maintenance.
- reducing maintenance burden (by not maintaining 3G)
- as far as I remember 3G as serious security vulnerabilities
Also most smart phones only a lifetime of 3-5 years at most, and even then people tend to replace them early due to braking them and for vanity.
So there are probably not too many smart phones around which do not support 4G and which are not a security liability. Through probably a bunch of fallback feature phones or other "less common" (then smartphones) kinds of phones.
The retired 3G spectrum will be used for 4G and 5G (per the FCC article) so the antennas could be reused as the carrier frequency will not change. For a concrete example, if you’re running 3G at 900 MHz, why would running 5G at 900 MHz require a different antenna?
On that note, saying the antennas don’t go up to true 5G frequencies is a bit…misleading? Because while the frequency goes up, the wavelength goes down so the antenna should shrink.
That's fair. Unfortunately I don't know the specifics of the hardware involved, and I wasn't there long enough to get a good understanding. I hope someone with more knowledge or industry experience can chime in. All I know that the company I worked for sold a completely new antenna assembly that supported 5G and that our customers were moving to using those antennas.
As far as the size, all of the units we sold have been approximately the same size for quite a while. E.g. all the chasses varied by maybe 6-10" max between the old assemblies and the new. The new ones were larger (maybe more room for power electronics?) I don't know if there was any effort on our part to support 5G transition without replacing our antennas.
Edit: I believe we were pushing new hardware because the services wanted to utilize the high frequency band of FR2 24-56Gz [1] (what I meant by "true 5G") that our old antenna assemblies couldn't support. I assume they couldn't support it because they weren't optimized for those bands at a high enough fidelity for good data transmission.
The FR2 hardware requires phased array antennaes for beamforming capability. While it technically could be used without beamforming, it would be extremely inefficient and have even less range than their already limited range. And those MIMO phased array antennaes are crazy expensive...it's still a technology with several active patent encumbrances.
Antennaes can be reused, but radio units and baseband units cannot, and those are by far more expensive. For example, a C-band array of radio units and baseband unit can cost upwards of $80k, while the antennae are a few thousand at most.
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.
Yes. 4G can stuff 300% more data hertz for hertz bandwidth compared to 3G. But 5G only does about 15-20% more data hertz for hertz than 4G. It really is a very minor increase in speed. All advertisements about 5G speed are really advertising for limited availability 3.5 GHz and mm-wave deployments in new spectrum... but of course the telcos are now realizing this spectrum, even the half gigahertz they stole of C band, doesn't actually propagate well around Earth instead of straight up and down. If speed alone were the desire, upgrading to 5G standard would not be worth it for anyone. What it does offer is vastly improved minimum latency and easier modularity in network backends.
So realistically, this shutting down of 3G should have happened when 4G came in if speed demands for spectrum were what mattered. But of course back then there weren't enough users to really justify it even if the speed argument applied more then than now.
2G and 3G standards have their place and keeping a 2 MHz channel open for them is not going to get in anyone's way, on the towers, or spectrum-wise.
> 5G only does about 15-20% more data hertz for hertz than 4G
At low-band, it's often quoted as 20%, but when you get to mid-band it's a lot more. That's one of the reasons there's been a mad-dash for mid-band spectrum.
I'd also note that the radio standards are made to evolve. LTE wasn't nearly as efficient as it was when it was introduced which is why, for a time, HSPA+ networks were able to compete with LTE.
> but of course the telcos are now realizing this spectrum, even the half gigahertz they stole of C band, doesn't actually propagate well around Earth instead of straight up and down
The propagation isn't really a surprise and the idea it was stolen is terribly biased. The incumbents on that spectrum were paid huge sums for it and moving expenses.
It does propagate well enough that it will be very meaningful. T-Mobile is seeing amazing gains using the 2.5GHz spectrum that they got through their merger with Sprint. They already cover around 60% of the US population with mid-band 5G. 3.5GHz won't propagate as well, but there are ways to overcome that like having the towers transmit at higher power and then having lower-frequency spectrum handle the uplink from the handset.
The three carriers didn't spend nearly $100B for something worthless and they aren't realizing its propagation as some sort of surprise.
> 2G and 3G standards have their place and keeping a 2 MHz channel open for them is not going to get in anyone's way, on the towers, or spectrum-wise
Running a 3G UMTS network requires 10MHz of spectrum. 10MHz of spectrum can be pretty meaningful. CDMA uses 2.5MHz for voice and 2.5MHz for data and maybe you're thinking of that, but it's still 5MHz to have both voice and data on a CDMA network.
Things can certainly be kept around, but it means less for other stuff.
>At low-band, it's often quoted as 20%, but when you get to mid-band it's a lot more.
That's an interesting claim. What aspect of the 2-4 GHz stuff gives 5G spec a greater relative spectral efficiency up there? The only thing I can think of would be tighter specifications for equipment phase noise and phase noise going up with frequency and becoming the main problem.
In many places yes, but still with a much reduced bandwidth allocations.
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.
GSM can easily share a frequency block with LTE/5G, so it's much easier to keep it around. 3G needs a whole 5 MHz frequency block for itself, but could you use the same block and assign 4.5 MHz to LTE or 5G and just 0.5 MHz for a few GSM legacy devices. That's why it makes sense to turn off 3G, but keep GSM for older devices.
In the US, that won't be the case. AT&T shut down GSM at the end of 2016. Verizon will be shutting down its 2G/3G CDMA network at the end of 2022. T-Mobile is also slated to shut down its 2G GSM network at the end of 2022.
As others have pointed out, 2G GSM uses less spectrum (not for the same usage, but as a base) with 0.2MHz channels rather than 5MHz channels. There's been some stuff talking about T-Mobile running GSM inside the guard bands of their LTE network (dead space between channels). Still, it seems like they're also going to be shutting it down.
T-Mobile's GSM network is pretty limited with maybe a third of the coverage of their LTE and 5G networks. It doesn't use any low-band spectrum so it performs pretty poorly. They also haven't been expanding it over the past 7 years or so, preferring to put their effort into LTE and now 5G.
They did keep GSM alive a lot longer than AT&T (6 years longer), but it seems like the reasons for keeping it alive are dwindling compared to the cost.
That used to be the case, ( ~2018 ) when MNO around the world have a similar stance, have 2G as Fall Back, and switching off 3G. But more and more operators are now thinking of the idea switching off both 2G and 3G within the next 5-10 years. So their whole network will be IP based.
I think that greatly depends how much they can continue to milk those 2G / 3G equipment. And the pandemic has speed things up a little bit.
It's shameful that 3G wasn't designed to be supported forever, and be backwards compatible with 4G, 5G, 6G, etc.
Just like WiFi standards are (mostly) backwards compatible forever.
From a design perspective, all that's needed is a way to timeslice or frequency slice the new and old signals. Then the cost of supporting old 3G devices drops as fewer and fewer of them exist, and dynamic time and frequency allocation can give more and more to 4G/5G/etc.
The infrastructure cost of 3G is large, but that needn't be the case - there are opensource projects that can run all the computation for a whole 3G network, auth, encryption, etc. on a single PC.
Yup. There have been warnings about this from the cell network providers for years. Anyone caught with their pants down has certainly been ignoring the problem.
For contrast. In the UK 3G has another 12 years ahead of it [0]
Not everyone uses a smartphone with the constant consumer churn. I've had a good quality Nokia "dumb" phone for 10 years and have no reason to buy a new one, I need a new £10 battery soon and then it will keep going for another ten years in this country.
I feel bad for some of my customers that I was shipping 3g routers until mid-2018. Looks like a couple automakers were shipping 3g equipment in 2019. I think several platforms like Tank Links are also going to have a purge when cheap 3g goes dark.
I wish there were some super cheap sparse data plans that worked out in the middle of nowhere USA. Everything out there want 10K units for get good discounts.
What are the technical characteristics of 3G and LTE? Will we lose a very useful fallback?
I ask because I have a very modern device which is basically useless when I put there a SIM of an operator which has LTE only, and works well with a 3G/LTE operator. I am speaking of the countryside and I wonder if the problem is the operator coverage or the technology utilized.
Disclaimer: I'm not a dark-mage-of-the-smith-chart - I'm just a dude who had to take a course in EM once. Honestly, I'm pretty ignorant and you should take all of this with a grain of salt.
My understanding is that the noise model is very different - that LTE/ofdm are very good at getting around radio noise by-frequency - ie a bunch of interference at a particular frequency. But 3G/umts/cdma was very good at dealing with multi-path distortion because of the whole chip-code-orthogonality property and the fact that the radio would have multiple time-shifted taps on the antenna. That would mean that in theory LTE would be better at dealing with persistent environmental noise, but 3G would be better in a city where the phone is receiving that same signal but reflected against buildings and slightly time-shifted.
I doubt this makes any difference in your case - it's probably just that 3G is typically on 850MHz and that LTE is probably on a higher frequency like 2300MHz which wouldn't propagate as well.
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?
Wait, the FCC now tells me that ALL 3g is going away, T-Mobile made it seem like only the sprint part of the network was going away. So, now I have to ditch my beloved Built To Last Samsung T-199. 8(
Depending on your operator/locality, and whether you're okay with being limited to voice and barely a 100 kbit/s of data, it might "just work", no need to do anything special. Your 3G phone will happily fall back to 2G/2.75G (a.k.a. GSM/GPRS/EDGE), where such network is available.
For example, in the Netherlands, KPN, the last operator to switch off 3G, is planning to do so at the end of this month.
2G, on the other hand, is still in the air, with commitments to keep it alive until 2025, possibly longer.
unlikely as long as you can't switch out the modem and antenna.
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.
A single board computer could get you close to these requirements, as long as there are USB dongles for everything [0]. That takes care of 1, 2, and 4. As for drivers, I'm not sure if you can pipe voice calls across these (VOIP, yes, but cellular calls? I have no clue how that works).
with SIP ATA you can probably get it to work with enough work. I don't know whether any actually support enough of TS 24.229 to actually work with a VoLTE network.
Is there any way to fix my old 3G phone to continue to work under 5G?
If you only use it around the house, you can get a picocell.
I once lived in a building that was too tall for cell service to reach the upper floor residences, and the carriers (mine was AT&T) would send the residents picocells to relay the signals from their cell phones to the internet.
The WiFi will still work for a long time to come. That's the best you can do. There are plenty of apps to call through WiFi. I use Skype for most of my calling. I only use the cell network when I'm outside the home.
Interesting. VoLTE is not at all standard or on all phones over here due to the carriers only enabling it for the phones that they sell with their plans.
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.