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Comment by hkt | Hacker News Reader

The joys of mandatory obsolescence. Forcing handset churn is environmentally irresponsible. Maybe it is time for landlines to get SMS so people don't have to rely on mobile infrastructure? 5am sentiment but it'd be nice.

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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.

Killing 3G for the sake of... what exactly? Nothing else is really using that space and literally 2.5+ million people seem content with the service.

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.

From my experience in the UK most telecoms have the same system, although I've only ever used it by accident and each time it left the person on the other end confused.

At one point BT hired Tom Baker to use his voice on their TTS system. I'm sure more people would use it if they kept his voice: https://youtu.be/aFsOhJgCSpw

Actually I'm pretty sure that exists in the UK too, but nobody I know uses a landline any more. My parents have one, but they use their mobiles more often than not.

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.

I wasn't aware of this — I don't live in Britain, and wouldn't use a landline if I did — but I will check my parents aren't worried about it. It looks like their existing DECT phone will just plug in to the router.

https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/broadband/article/digital-vo...

There are plenty of areas without real landlines already. Maintaining aging copper infrastructure simply isn't worth the money, so your "landline" is now a SIP connection turned into analog by your modem.

Walkways in 2026, paper and pencils in 2027.

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