You don’t see the need for an individual to buy a new one every year, or you don’t see the need for a manufacturer to release a new one every year?
How will she get pics off the camera if she doesn’t have data? A quick review of the manual doesn’t show that it has WiFi.
If there’s only a handful of people still using that technology they will have to pay increasing rates to cover the maintenance costs. It gets pretty expensive to keep older technology running and secure.
Plus the problem with 2G is not just maintenance costs to keep those towers running and the backhaul turned on (although that’s an enormous cost that’s probably on the edge of becoming a money loser).
The bigger issue is that each company only has so much radio spectrum available under their licenses with little or no opportunity to get more at any price. At some point, they have to recycle that 2G spectrum and use it for the growing customer base. The newer technologies are much more efficient, so that block of 2G spectrum held aside for legacy customers really hurts. I don’t have any real figures, but imagine a situation that each individual 2G customer requires the same amount of resources as say 4 customers on the newer platforms. Couple that with the unrecovered infrastructure costs and boom, you’ve just seen 2Gs death warrant.
The old fashioned way, with USB.
Thanks, I wasn’t sure if this was the case for 2G but I presume this is the real driver. The same reason TV analog over-the-air is gone.
Yeah. About a decade ago there was an abortive attempt to have the group I was a part of take over some of the in-building 2G sites we were deploying. I’m not going to 100% swear that may memory was absolutely correct, but I recall it having 12 timeslots that could each be explicitly set to handle a voice call or a 128K data stream (which comes out to a T1, which makes sense)
A couple years ago, I assisted in double-checking network settings for the first deployments of cell towers that had 600 Meg backhaul circuits going to them.
Now, it’s entirely possible that the devices I was looking at a decade ago were limited by manufacturer choices and not technology, and comparing a single cell BTS to a tower backhaul is not a completely 1-to-1 comparison, but I think it’s fair to say that we’re talking orders of magnitude improvements of efficiency.
The thing is, though, that it probably is an insignificant number. The businesses would love to have them as customers if they were making money on them (or in the case of 2G, not preventing them from making more money using the spectrum for something else). If there were consumer demand there, this would likely not be happening.
(And with most things technical, the folks who are unwilling to upgrade anything “because I’m used to it” are also generally unwilling to buy anything for their old system “because I’m used to the old way.” Which is why new software programs don’t support even 4-5 year old versions of operating systems: adding it wouldn’t produce enough sales to cover the added development cost).
Choosing to stay out of the mainstream is a perfectly valid choice, but it is a choice.
This appears to be one of those cases where a good becomes more expensive as less people want it, contrary to traditional supply and demand theory. If lots of people want something, it becomes more economical to produce it for them. If just a few people just want cheap telephone service, they’re not going to be able to get it because the phone companies can’t make money on the kinds of services that those people want at the prices they want to pay. It’s just another fact of life in the modern mass-production-oriented industrialized world, where you can’t simply help a customer with something very simple that no one else wants simply because the “very simple” entails a whole lot of baggage that can’t be paid for due to lack of demand for that service.
I personally do not use a cell phone at all, and have one in my car for emergencies that I keep a pre-paid card with to use it to activate if I need to make a call. It’s with AT&T, and my phone is very old, so it sounds like I may need to get a new plan of action for what to do in emergencies. If you’re wondering how I keep up with things and do whatever when I’m not home, the simple answer is I very rarely leave home and the added benefit to my life of having a complicated cellular phone is not worth the cost.
^^^^
This, indeed. I concur.
But if that 1954 phone was small, wireless, and portable, it would do 100% of what many people actually need from a cell phone, and what cell phones in fact were originally conceived for. And that includes me. Those wishing to call me a Luddite will kindly note that I was an early adopter of cell technology and had the earliest cell phone, the Motorola “brick” – at a time when most people had never even heard the term “cell phone” – because it served an important need. I am a non-adopter of “smart” phones because I’m neither a business person nor a teenager with ADHD.
I have a Motorola flip phone that is a slight variant of a Razr and it must be 9 or 10 years old now. It still meets all my needs, and still goes for weeks between charges on its original battery (full disclosure: I use it very little). I understand from a technical perspective why networks are being upgraded and I’m not going to go all Luddite and complain about it, but I will say this: if my wireless provider that I’ve been with for about 15 years is going to use my own money to upgrade their network in a way that renders my phone useless, then they can kindly replace it with a phone that works and bloody well better not charge me for it or stick me with a contract or raise my monthly rates.
These are the same guys that just sent me an announcement about their awesome commitment to technology and how they have introduced major new magnificent improvements to their voicemail system. Getting to the bottom line, what it was really saying was “effective this date, you will need to set up your voicemail system all over again. Your voicemail service and features will remain exactly the same.” :rolleyes:
And they are available today, just not on G2. The new phones cost less than $50 and will work just fine for years, until some day that technology will be replaced and you’ll have to buy a new simple phone.
IMO, that’s a completely unsupportable request, and I see no reason a phone company owes you anything of that nature. There was no expectation that your phone will be supported in perpetuity. If you want that guarantee, you’ll need to pay significantly more up front.
I would say they do, but we’ll see when the times comes. The thing about having owned a phone long enough from the same provider for it to become obsolete is that said provider has raked in a very significant pile of dough over those years. In fact the Motorola flip phone in question was given to me free by the service provider without a contract simply because my old phone broke and I had been a customer a long time. It cost them almost nothing and kept me as a paying customer for another decade. If they are now going to refuse to do the same thing even though this time the problem is of their own doing, then that’s a really bad business decision because I’ll probably switch providers just on principle.
Incidentally, there seem to be signs that compatibility problems are occurring already. I was at someone’s house recently in a downtown urban area and my phone would simply not receive calls, even though it had service and could make outgoing calls, and everyone else’s phones worked. I thought there was something wrong with it but it receives calls fine in other cellular areas. Not sure what was going on but I do imagine that high-density urban areas would be the first to see network changes.
I have no sympathy for you poor 2G Sunset victims!
You think you have it bad… In my business, we are being forced to upgrade hundreds of embedded 2g Modems, and those are WAY more expensive than some obsolete POS flip phone.
2g, 3g, and 4g use different radio formats. Think of it like the difference between a digital TV broadcast and the old analog service. If you have an old analog TV, it can’t understand the new format of digital broadcasts. Although 2g is digital as well, it’s a different radio format from 3g, which is different from 4g.
I took my son to his orthodontist yesterday, and was wondering how they can do business. There’s not a computer in the whole office.
I also hate VM, to the point that I changed my outgoing message to say that I don’t regularly check the VM, and I’ll respond faster to SMS or WhatsApp.
I never even set up VM on my phone. If I don’t answer you can call again or text me.I’m 45.
I’d be surprised if they didn’t offer a phone at some point. This article from way back in 2012 when they started this process, they apparently were offering one
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/att-to-end-2g-service-offers-free-3g-phone-upgrades/
It’s not your money. It’s their money.
Yes. That is the purpose of a for profit company that offers goods and services to the public. Welcome to Democracy and Capitalism.
That’s interesting, thank you. As I’m in Canada US providers aren’t directly relevant, but the same thing is happening here.
I thought of this thread a couple of days ago when my faithful old Motorola flip phone beeped with a text message, and lo and behold it was the service provider informing me that as of January 2017 they will be discontinuing CDMA service. It was funny reading the above link about AT&T warning customers about the discontinuation of 2G GSM service – my current phone is still on CDMA.
The good news is that as a hater of smart phones I may have some attractive options from my provider. I’m sure they would give me another free phone but I don’t want crap. One of the potential good ones is the Kyocera DuraXE. Any comments on this either as a phone or just the principle of avoiding smartphones? The nice thing is that it’s neither a true smartphone nor a cheap big-button dumb phone for Luddites. It seems to be an elegant flip phone with basic smartphone capabilities in a compact and extremely durable package, rated both MIL-STD-810G for durability and IP68 for environment, including the ability to be immersed in up to 6 ft of water for 30 minutes without harm.
I have yet to try to negotiate anything with the provider, but this is an affordable phone even on straight retail terms, and doesn’t require a data plan. Any wise thoughts on this option?
In researching the AT&T 2G shutdown, I came across a simple way to tell if your Tracfone SIM card is AT&T or T-Mobile.
Good news: Ours is T-Mobile.
Bad news: If we’re in an area with only AT&T coverage, oops.
So I will probably upgrade after some more research, etc. But I can take my time.