Hacker News Reader

Comment by sroussey | Hacker News Reader

It would be great if Apple and Google had a setting to disable 2G and 3G at the very least.

My phone does it.

You have to enter this code in the dialer:

    *#*#4636#*#*

After which you can navigate to "Phone Information" and decide which networks to use.

For example, if you select "LTE Only", then the phone will not connect to 2G/3G networks, and instead show that there is no signal.

This works for most Android phones.

This will break phone calls if your carrier does not support Voice over LTE (VoLTE), as the device will be unable to switch over to 3G to handle incoming/outgoing calls.

Yes. That's a necessary side effect of disabling 2G/3G. If that's an issue, you can either only disable 2G, or switch to a carrier that supports VoLTE.

Yup this should work on most Android smartphones.

There's like 20 options there. Do you know how to just disable 2G (keep LTE/3G enabled)?

"LTE/WCDMA/UMTS (auto)" should do it.

go to the apple store and ask for a "cdma-less" iphone

got this trick from a verizon engineer after complaining about such risks. carriers dont carry them but apple should be able to sell you one

>and ask for a "cdma-less" iphone

isn't that just a regular GSM phone? According to https://www.techwalls.com/iphone-11-a2111-a2221-a2223-model-... there's only 3 variants of the iphone 11: the north american variant (with CDMA support), rest of the world variant, and a chinese variant.

Isn't LTE different than CDMA and GSM? A CDMA-less Verizon iPhone would support LTE (4g) only.

Good find, but worth checking if Apple can fulfill this request for Americans.

A CDMA less phone would not be eligible for Verizon.

https://www.reddit.com/r/verizon/comments/8nvh91/att_iphone_...

The T-Mobile and AT&T carrier sold iPhones did not come with CDMA support, not sure about current models.

> It would be great if Apple and Google had a setting to disable 2G and 3G at the very least.

I don't know if its a Google, Samsung, or AT&T feature, but my Android has a default-off setting to enable 2G service. Nothing on 3G though.

which android phone model?

S10+

It will not make much if your phone company doesn't do the same, and stops accepting roaming requests from rogue countries.

Somebody should also punch Google in the face for building in an "espionage API" into Android: reading sim card serial, imsi, and imei without even a notice. I doubt the thriving market of SS7 interceptions would be anywhere if not for Android creating a market for such data.

maybe we could build android without it ?

It would be better if telcos and their equipment vendors implemented some protections. Like the ability to disable roaming (and deny any related SS7 requests) at subscriber's request.

Is 4G & 5G vulnerable? I wonder if a jailbreak tweak exists to disable 2G and 3G.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com