2.7M Brits still use a 3G only handset

I've found LTE to be both faster and more reliable where I'm attached to a tower that provides LTE and UMTS in the same band (e.g. the 2degrees network in New Zealand uses the 900 MHz band for both UMTS and LTE at many of their sites). UMTS has remarkably poor peformance at the cell edge where it at best data connections can only deliver a few kilobits at random intervals whereas LTE provides a reliable and consistent data connection even if it is only 100kbps. I've seen LTE maintain a stable connection at signal levels where GSM would have long since dropped the connection and UMTS would struggle. Makes stuff like emails usable at the far edge of LTE coverage where it's impossible to achieve the same off the UMTS signal from the same tower in the same band. It's so good I hate it when my phone falls back to UMTS in places I know full well LTE service exists. Thankfully all three carries in my country are planning to switch off UMTS in the next two years which will greatly improve service.

I live in Northern Ireland, I get 5G pretty much everywhere I've cared to look. I do a lot of cycling and I stream Spotify at max settings and it's never cut out even in the middle of nowhere so I assume I'm getting at least 4G everywhere.

In Belfast I get 115/20 mbps down/up with EE, I think I remember hearing there's something dodgy with whether what your phone shows as 5G is actually 5G but that's easily fast enough for anything I'm likely to be doing from my phone.

I'd say it's been like this for years. Looking at a coverage map it looks like it gets spottier out west where fewer people live though

5G (and 4G before it) has more spectrum allocated at higher and lower frequencies. If your carrier has licenses for low frequency and deploys it, it should help a bit with coverage.

Recently visited South Yorkshire for the first time in 4 years. I didn’t notice a big difference between 3 and 4G coverage, but it was shocking how much of the city area has complete coverage blackspots. Both for myself connected to EE and a friend connected to Vodafone.

Had no problems anywhere in the UK in recent years on 4G and I've been all over the place.

4G has been incredibly reliable for me. Even on a £10/month SIM only thing, I was up a volcano in the middle of nowhere in Iceland and able to make calls.

Was your carrier Three/EE? They were terrible.

I found in the UK most carriers 3G was horrid, and 4G actually worked. Vodafone best, second was Three, then O2. Circ early 2020s.

My iPhone 13 mini burns a percent of the battery every few minutes in areas with poor cell reception. That was the first year with 5G support if I remember right. Locking to 4G doesn't seem to make a huge difference. Maybe the new modems don't suck?

It'll last a day or two with good cell reception; longer in airplane mode.

4G has been rock solid for me since 2010 (I dont use 5G due to battery reasons) - in Sweden/Switzerland

When I still lived in south Hampshire, I couldn't get any Internet via 4G. 5G barely chugged. Now in Berkshire both 4G and 5G work quite well. I'm on Vodafone network though so YMMV.

Whether it matches the 3G coverage you had, I'm not sure. But in general, yes, 4G coverage has improved significantly since 2019.

It's considerably better, I live in the East Midlands in a rural village and get 4G and 5G depending on where I am in the house.

Ironically 3G is often the reason 4G/5G has poor reception.

1G/2G/3G all need to have a dedicated channel for itself. They were usually given the frequencies with the longest range, which is the 800MHz band. When 4G was introduced it couldn't share that band with 3G, so it was usually given space on higher frequencies around 1800MHz and 2500MHz. Those bands also allow a higher data rate, and anyone out of their range could fall back to 3G so it's a win-win, right?

Buuuuut now we're stuck with 4G in a band with poor reception, and throwing out 3G means losing coverage. Ideally the 4G sites in low-density areas would be moved to 800MHz, but that's going to require significant effort because every single antenna will need to be modified by engineers. Had 4G been deployed to 800MHz initially this wouldn't have been an issue - but that wasn't really possible because it would've meant worse speeds for existing 3G customers.

This whole issue is avoided with 5G because 4G and 5G were explicitly designed to coexist on the same channel.

Imagine if Apple or Google were retroactively removing a feature. The shitstorm would be outrageous.

Where I'm from, the same discussion appears every two years, when the government tries once more to shutdown FM radio. Luckily, they always get shut down by the people. Maybe don't try to shut down public services that millions of people actually rely on.

Some devices are very hard or expensive to replace. EV: car infotainment systems.

Not long before the 3G voice gets disabled too so the spectrum can get reused.

Are there that many smartphones that are actually capable of running YT and have a access to a version of Android/iOS that’s still supported and are 4g only?

iPhone 5 was the first to support 4G and I’m not sure the 4s or 4 are really suitable for watching YT these days?

> Is it really that much overhead to keep 2G networks operating?

Network spectrum, perhaps? Once 2G is switched off that spectrum can be repurposes for other stuff, and it's a finite resource.

I agree with the general sentiment but 2g was launched in 1991. Turned off "tomorrow" seems like a bit of an exaggeration. 3g has also been available for 2 decades.

There's only a limited amount of space in the airwaves. Either old stuff gets turned off, or you can't add any new stuff.

I agree that mandatory obsolescence is a bad thing, but the first 4G networks went online in 2009 and are now 15 years old. Dropping support for >10-year-old handsets isn't great, but definitely understandable. If you're mad at anyone, it should be the companies who keep selling 3G-only handsets until this very day.

It it not more the producers and sellers of 3G handsets that should be blamed if they kept selling 3g phones after the end date for 3G was announced?

Many years ago, Sprint used to have a "text to landline" feature on their network. You could send an SMS from your phone and then their server would dial the landline and use a speech synthesizer to read out the text.

Usually I would agree with you on the mandatory obsolescence thing but useful radio spectrum is a finite resource and the newer technologies are far more efficient both with spectrum utilisation and with power consumed. This is one of those cases where moving forward just makes sense.

Continuously sustaining the infrastructure rather than phasing it out has to have higher environmental expenses at some point. We might be even already past it?

The amount of client devices that would need to be replaced is only declining.

Landlines are being taken away by 2025.

Ah, so this is what happened! I visit the villages next to the border near Bratislava often. I used to have no connectivity issues there, but now I get 2G first (which is almost unusable) and if I'm lucky I eventually connect to 4G.

Yeah here in Spain too, still can't get 5G on prepay. It's not like it's new anymore.. Pretty annoying. I really don't want a contract.

All three networks have disabled 3G access in 2021, as far as I know.

When network operators or phone manufacturers say 4G, they usually mean LTE, yes.

I think the solution in all these cases isn't to make sure that everything works without id, without smartphone, with cash etc. It's to ensure everyone has access to technology, id, banks and so on.

Like voting. Yes it's a democracy problem if you have historically made it difficult or less likely for some groups to have ID, to suddenly require it. But it's not a democratic problem to require ID after first ensuring everyone has free and easy access to ID, and actually have the ID.

>the great tech-poor divide nobody cares

in the US, mentally ill drug addicted homeless people living on the street generally have smartphones

You do not have to interact with the government or the central bank via these new technologies, the same way you do not have to interact with them via email or phone, since you always have the free option to do your business in person. Although obviously it is a much less convenient way to do so, but convenience isn't a right, and having more money is mostly about living more comfortably and conveniently (past the point at which you can cover your basic needs, which most democratic countries cover with their social systems).

In democracies, the second any interaction with a public institution mandates some kind of technology, without providing an alternative, I would assume a basic free option would have to be provided to legal resident of such country.

What's a desktop?

(that is to say, majority of people only have a phone these days)

Critical systems are using or will fallback to 2G, which will stay with us forever. The bandwidth is not required there anyway.

parking meters, apparently.

LTE is 10 years old.

You can still use any phone supporting 2G (which is essentially all 3G phones) for phone calls and texting. If you need fast data, you'll need to upgrade – and chances are your 10-year old phone isn't very good at displaying modern websites anyway. There are root CA certificates that have expired since some of these phones received their last software update, for example.

I see environmental impact of electronics frequently mentioned but, gotta be honest, I'm not sure I really buy that there is a major environmental impact there. Even if someone is getting a brand new phone every year, that's how much plastic and silicon? In a year?

Compare that to the daily disposable plastics just for food. Or the amount of plastics for shipping and storing goods.

Operating slower RF equipment isn't just affecting the single end user though. That user is affecting everyone else wanting to share that spectrum.