Plan Ahead for Phase Out of 3G Cellular Networks and Service (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

I imagine there will be a fair bit of industrial equipment and smart meters needing replaced as a result!

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.

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.

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.

Yeah this is what I would think. My understanding is that in North America a lot of plum 800MHz bands are currently occupied by 3G umts.

edit - yes, both Verizon and AT&T are dedicating a single band of 850MHz spectrum for umts. So this would let them move that to 4G or 5G.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Frequency_range_2_(24%E2%80...

[0] https://www.amazon.com/4g-usb-modem/s?k=4g+usb+modem

Also a strange quote from BT since they don't actually have a mobile network.