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Comment by thorum | Hacker News Reader

> Furthermore, the study also reveals 21% of those with a 3G handset aren’t willing to upgrade, and will simply continue to use their phone without internet connectivity.

Seems reasonable. Is this supposed to be a bad thing?

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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.

>when the government tries once more to shutdown FM radio

in the US, what killed FM radio is the death of independent stations with local DJs, replaced by nationwide corporate homogeneity

May I suggest KEXP? Lister powered radio station. They have many unique shows throughout the week focusing on all sorts of genres. KEXP is broadcast in Seattle on 90.3FM, and coming to the Bay Area on 92.7FM in 2024. You can also listen live online at https://kexp.org/, and they also keep their last two weeks of programming on their archive here: https://www.kexp.org/archive/.

There's also Pacifica radio https://pacificanetwork.org which has a few stations around the country, but including WBAI https://wbai.org which has had a hacker-themed and hacker-led show on the air regularly since 1989. https://2600.com/offthehook/archive_ra.html

Google kills products every year. It also should not be a surprise to anyone that tech have an expiration date.

They do. As an example, over time older/weaker versions of TLS are gradually phased out. It's now difficult/impossible to access many websites from outdated devices without using a special proxy.

Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft also regularly remove features from their consoles retroactively. You buy a subscription for access to them - and telecom networks - not the right to use them forever

But that is not the same because radio spectrum is a very limited resource and those old uses are preventing newer uses. So the very limited bands of RF can only gain new uses say once per generation, as old FM radio users die out? Is that really a good trade-off?

FM radios are built into cars, hi-fi receivers etc. – things that people sometimes use for decades and more. Unlike for TVs, you also can't just add a set-top box to a car, for example.

That said, I don't understand what's so hard about just running both digital and analog in parallel for 20 or even 30 years. This would create an incentive to upgrade to the new, digital standard (better quality, more programming etc.) without outright cutting millions of people and their legacy devices off.

The US arguably did a better job transitioning to digital radio by using a digital system (HD radio) that seamlessly falls back to an analog AM or FM signal, and they have more constraints in terms of broadcast licensing restrictions than most other countries.

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

Is this sarcasm? Just in case it is not:

https://killedby.tech/google/

Are any of those examples of removing a feature from a hardware device, which to me seemed to be the point of the parent. They're comparing car entertainment/GPS systems with phones.

Maybe 12 years ago, I had a device with sideloading that allowed me to run Plex (genuinely used for photo viewing). NowTV removed side-loading via a forced update and thus removed the principle reason I bought that device rather than another. Bought a FireTV stick after that and downloaded Plex from their appstore.

@Longhanks wasn't specifically talking about hardware. They said "Maybe don't try to shut down public services that millions of people actually rely on" and implied Google wouldn't do such a thing.

Google did exactly this when it shut down Google Reader in 2013. Feedly saw an influx of 3 million new users in the two weeks following the shutdown.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170721090528/https://blog.feed...

They've definitely bricked hardware before (e.g. Stadia, likely Jamboard).

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

Why these haven't been modular from the start is beyond belief anyway. It shouldn't cost more than 50€ for a new mobile data/phone uplink module, and yet, some manufacturers want the entire unit to be exchanged...

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

Yeah, I'd be surprised if that didn't happen eventually - 2G is already completely phased out here in Australia and all the networks are shutting down their 3G networks this year, so VoLTE/VoNR are the only options now. Surely that will happen eventually in the UK also?

The topic of the article is a 3G shutdown in the UK. It's in the headline!

The second paragraph mentions that 2G will be around for a decade or so longer, so that's the route voice will take.

3G is what's being shut down, so yes, that will go away very soon.

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