BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year | Hacker News Reader

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

theregister.com

42 pointsDoches59 comments

I'm going to bet on an extension once they realize how much infra is still on 3G. Power, water, gas, sewage, lots of telemetry and control still uses it. That stuff has a design lifetime of 30 years or more and replacing it or parts of it is very costly.

One of the main excuses for not deploying 5G at the moment is the alleged lack of access to "urban furniture". More precisely , they don't want to pay. Basically they want the people to pay for it with their taxes and the rack up the profits with contracts.

I'm sure this has something to do with that, it would be cheaper for them to replace 3G infrastructure with 5G.

Number one reason 5G deployments are hampered in UK are the nimbys and the anti-5G crazies. Absolutely loads of council applications are turned down due to complaints from locals.. Some of which are not even local at all.

Same here, the COVID thing really brought the madness to the surface, all kinds of complot theory pushers have found very fertile ground and suddenly there is an army of tin foil hatters prepared to commit crimes to put their worries to rest, such as burning mobile telecommunications infrastructure.

They've had a few years notice though.

2018: BT Aims to Switch Off 3G by 2022: https://www.lightreading.com/2g-3g-4g/bt-aims-to-switch-off-...

Yes, that's the point: it didn't work. It won't work again, right now (or in January). Until the cost is manageable, which I think we'll see in a decade or so. But right now I'd bet against it. They might actually go through with it in some remote location and claim victory, or, alternatively they might do it and then roll it back quietly. But 3G isn't going anywhere because some interests trump others. These messages are basically an attempt to convince their paymasters that they are running an efficient ship and to - hopefully - urge some 3G users to finally migrate. But lots of them will simply not be able to.

Infrastructure is always longer lived than it is intended. Next time you're in a London tube station have a look at the cabling and signalling hardware and take a guess at when it was made. 3G gear is brand new by comparison and just as critical to the parties using it.

> Until the cost is manageable

But isn't that the problem - removing 3G will likely save or make BT money - the cost is born by the companies that have installed devices with 3G.

The turn off of 3G does look a lot more likely now (although could still slip):

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/inform...

For real, I've always though such a switch to 5G was premature after the investment poured in 4G.

Why? Are people tiktoking that much to require an upgrade? Especially one that seems to break a lot of backwards compatibility

My phone is capable of 3G (and 2G as well, but I haven't used that in a long time) and I've used it all over Europe. It is funny because sometimes I have bad coverage for newer bands and protocols but 3G always saves the day in those cases. In Latin America it was quite useful as well, especially rural areas.

If you turn off 3G it lets them repurpose that spectrum for 4G/5G is my understanding

I've never understood why anybody cares about 5G, what do people do on their phones where bandwidth is a bottleneck? 4G is clearly fast enough for video streaming at resolutions and bitrates that matter for small screens. Online gaming tends to get bottlenecked on lately moreso than bandwidth and anybody who takes it seriously will be playing on consoles and PC. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume most filesharing happens on PC also. So what's the point?

With sufficiently fast mobile internet, there is no more need to be digging and drilling to pull cables through roads and buildings

(I’ve been using a 4G/5G dongle as my primary internet access for the past 4 years because the council is perpetually “3-6 months away” from bringing a fibre connection to my street. 4G was pretty painful, but 5G is actually just-about-tolerable by my gamer-nerd standards, and the less-technical friends and family who visit my house don’t even notice. Maybe the 20ms pings with occasional 100ms spikes is too much for professional-level FPS competitions, but I’m happy to chill out in the silver leagues so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

In congested areas 5G should provide significant benefit. I was in London a while ago (using an old-ish 4G-only phone); in busy areas it's really not good, at all.

>Are people tiktoking that much to require an upgrade?

Yes. Total global wireless data traffic went from 58 exabytes per month in 2019 to 154 exabytes per month in 2022 and is predicted to surpass 326 exabytes per month by 2025.

4G cannot handle this. 5G probably cannot handle this rate of growth for much longer.

https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-repo...

Most of that is on 2G.. which is why 2G isn't getting killed yet.

Yes. My first thought was smart meters.

I'm confused though because this [1] gives different timelines.

https://www.smartme.co.uk/smets-2.html

> Power, water, gas, sewage, lots of telemetry and control still uses it.

In the UK specifically? In Ireland at least, most of that stuff seems to be on GPRS; my impression is that it's always been assumed that 3G's days were numbered, so the infra stuff got left on 2G (the GPRS network seems unkillable).

They should think about switching on 5G as well.

The UK being one of the worst countries for 5G deployment, with totally fake coverage (shows the 5G logo but connected to LTE).

  - "On average, 5G users spent 10.1% of the time connected to a 5G network." Ofcom, July 2023

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/264600/...

There's a busy area down the road from me that I consistently get a couple bars of 5G signal but the internet is unusable in a 200 metre radius. Sucks for all the local businesses around.

Are you on a network that runs its own infrastructure or an MVNO? I've experienced the same thing a lot, especially on 4G in busy holiday spots, and have been told that apparently MVNO traffic is heavily deprioritised versus that of the primary carrier.

I'm on O2. The "busy" area is just a normal mini high street. Nothing out of the ordinary.

> with totally fake coverage

In my region, maps shows full coverage with "excellent" outdoor signal, but I get at most two to three lines on my phone. It's basically a scam.

The amount of "bars" is irrelevant. You need to check if you're actually connected to 5G and that's very well hidden. (##4636## on android. Anything but "connected" for "NR State" means you're actually connected to 5G)

I thought 5G was mostly about managing congestion. What's the improvement over 4G for most users?

Well, I've been to Portugal recently, Porto to be precise, they have actual 5G which you can actually connect to, and despite roaming and the amount of tourists, it was night and day: everything loaded instantly, not a single hickup.

Back in the UK, I spent last weekend in London, 5G logo always on but not actually connected. I could not even send a message when I was in busy areas.

So yes, it helps with congestion, you just don't realise how congested the network is until you've tried the real thing.

The issue here could well be the backhaul... just because you can get 5g to the cell tower doesn't ensure you will have a fast connection from the tower to the core network.

> Back in the UK, I spent last weekend in London, 5G logo always on but not actually connected

on Three? They're famously garbage. I wouldn't suggest anything other than EE or - distant second - Vodafone in London.

I just got a 5G-supporting phone yesterday, and had previously thought the same thing. Then I did a speed test and got 600Mbit/sec.

To be honest, LTE was mostly _fine_, but this seems to be generally noticeably better.

Yeah, I thought 5G was a gimmick until I found myself somewhere with proper 5G speeds and downloaded Witcher 3 onto my SteamDeck through my phone. It was nice briefly living in the future.

>The UK being one of the worst countries for 5G deployment, with totally fake coverage (shows the 5G logo but connected to LTE).

I read the linked PDF and did some searching but I didn't see in what instances networks use a 5G Logo for LTE (although I do recall hearing about something like that in the past)... could you give some more detail?

5G is currently NSA (not standalone), it can't be used without 4G/LTE. It needs a 4G connection to anchor itself on, to act as a supplementary band. This is also known as ENDC. This is an intermediary step to proper full blown, standalone 5G which will probably happen in a few years.

It's often the case that when connected to a 4G site which can act as a master or anchor to 5G bands (ie it advertises ENDC capability) your average smartphone will show you the 5G icon, but in reality you are only connected to 4G/LTE and there may not even be a 5G site nearby to aggregate.. This is probably why it's called "fake".

It is indeed very cheeky of the operators or manufacturers to show 5G when 5G is not actually in use. Marketing...

We're very technologically backwards. Just look at the FTTP rollout, which has now been delayed to 2030.

What's worse is that FTTP is the worst kind... time shared GPON. Not true FTTP in my book (a single fibre per premise back to the exchange).

BT Openreach also seems to be getting away with an unjustified price structure too. ADSL established a precedent for upload speeds being far slower than download speeds, and this has been continued with FTTC and is being continued with FTTP.

There are a lot of good uses cases for faster uploads (backup to cloud, home servers, maybe things like video conferencing) and much less gain from faster downloads (except allowing websites to be even more bloated and more HD video to watch on smartphones)

Who's "we" in this context? Are you talking about a particular telco you work for?

FTTP was rolled out where I live by several providers almost 2 years ago. I don't live anywhere particularly urban.

I think we were at the back of the queue for this with FTTP available in UK cities for a few years now.

(For the avoidance of confusion I mean actual FTTP and not fibre to a cab/twisted pair to premises).

> Who's "we" in this context? Are you talking about a particular telco you work for?

If that were the case, I would have said so.

I'm referring to the UK in general. The FTTP roll-out has been delayed to 2030 (which is, if I remember correctly, 5 years ahead of the original date).

The best I've ever had is Virgin with DOCSIS, which is an unfortunate situation -- in that space, you quite literally have no competition amongst providers. Surprised the regulator hasn't done anything about it.

FTTP is already available in lots of places. I have a choice of two providers right now neither of which is Virgin or BT.

So to say that FTTP is not going to be rolled out until 2030 doesn’t make sense unless you are talking about by a specific provider in a specific place.

I'm referring to Openreach, which, according to their own statistics[0], cover 28.6m houses in the UK.

I'm unsure if you're being pedantic, as both the roll-out and Openreach are fairly well known here :)

[0]: https://www.openreach.com/about

No, I'm not being pedantic. If you mean just Openreach, just say Openreach, I did ask.

You're talking as if BT was still some wing of the government and the only ones allowed invest in UK network infrastructure.

This isn't 1995, they might be the biggest but they're not the only player.

As mentioned, City Fibre[1] and Trooli[2] have their own networks and there are others.

FTTP has already been rolled out in many parts of the UK, so saying "UK FTTP roll out has been delayed until 2030" is just not true.

I'm in the UK and using FTTP right now.

1. https://cityfibre.com/

2. https://www.trooli.com/

Not sure why this is getting down voted. I'm in the UK right now for work and it seems to me the country is riddled with bureaucracy. An army of bureaucrats making sure the actual doers has to bend over backwards to follow some ridiculous rules.

I am not surprised the 5G roll out is taking time in the UK.

Agreed, and not sure either; the 5G rollout is another great example. In most of the houses I've been in, you're lucky to have cable (for DOCSIS). Most are stuck on ADSL, with providers selling misleading "superfast fibre" products that, in comparison to the rest of the world, are not super fast in any sense of the word.

If you look at BT, they offer FTTP but a lot of the time you have pitiful upload rates (symmetric 1Gbps would be nice), like 1Gbps/100Mbps.

There's a lot of bureaucracy over here, which slows technological advances down. Couple that with the very outdated architecture we have over here (we've pushed ADSL to its limits), it's quite sad.

There is a technical reason for that, 5G in UK (and 99% of the world) is NSA, ie not stand alone, it acts as a supplementary band, anchored in LTE. Your phone/router will only aggregate this 5G band under load (ie downloading, streaming hq etc), most of the time there is little load so 5G is not needed. It is also a power optimization issue, as 5G processing requires more battery.

In my experience with my phone Samsung S10e, and my provider being a reseller, I am able to use 4g and 3g (when available). And 3g provides better and superior coverage.

With LTE, few times I am unable to browse or do anything because I have no signal, if I switch to 3g I immediately have 2 or 3 bars and can use it. Unfortunately, I can't force the phone to use 3g as I used to do, because more and more areas are now without any kind of 3g coverage.

So I guess I will have just bad 4g signal, until I decide to upgrade a perfectly fine working phone with 5g support, and only then I will be able to discover if 5g is good as 3g or bad as 4g.

The frequency 3G uses will be refarmed for 4G most likely. With any luck you won't have to upgrade. In fact the Samsung S10e does support LTE B8 900Mhz which is how you are probably getting your 3G now.

Some longer term hardware is 3G, many car telematics, sat-navs etc for one.

> many car telematics

Well that's awesome in my opinion. Your older model car can no longer spy on you.

Most of those can drop down to 2G as well, can't they? And 2G won't be turned off for a while yet.

Sure, it's a lot slower, but more reliable. And more then enough for a little traffic or weather data.

I hope this is coupled with an improvement in 4G and 5G coverage, then. I quite frequently find myself on 3G only in the UK.

What I don't get is why you can't buy a plan that supports roaming on every major network. I'd pay double for a plan where my phone connects to whatever 4G or 5G is available regardless of provider, but the free market doesn't seem to have figured out this idea.

Does make me wonder what will happen to a lot of the Gas and Electricity Smart Meters that rely on 3G (will they fall back to 2G?)

There are also plans for 2G to be switched off by 2033 referenced in the article.

From the CTO of the Data Communications Company (the organisation behind smart meter infrastructure in the UK):

> Our second-generation meter solution is primarily based on the 3G network which has commitments through to 2033 based on our current contract, so this service remains mainly unaffected for the next 11 years.

https://www.smartdcc.co.uk/news-events/2g-sunset-looking-int...

I read somewhere that electricity meters are switching to a scheme where they do low speed data transmission over the power cables and the data is collected at each substation. Gas uses plastic pipes now so I guess they are stuck with the phone network.

A very costly replacement?!

The UK smart meter rollout is/was the most expensive among countries that went this route of smart meters.

Or move up North (or Scotland) as "our", ekhm, "smart meters", are using a radio technology.

Meanwhile here in Germany we're still on Edge half the time on trains etc.

Even here in central Hamburg there are a lot of dark spots

Well, Germany has already shut down 3G two years ago, and LTE is just too new, you know? /s

Hopefully this will improve the privacy my old VW Golf by stopping the telemetry from working.

I have a feeling that it's already stopped working as I don't think I'm getting traffic updates any more.

In line with most carriers across Europe. Sweden's native (and Nordic) carriers are also shutting 3G down during 2024.

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