> The N900 that lays next to me right now still works as a phone.
It soon won't be. 3G and 2G network are being depreciated quickly around the world
It soon won't be. 3G and 2G network are being depreciated quickly around the world
There are some weird bits of the 900MHz band that cross into the fairly free-to-use ISM bands in some countries, and I recall a CCC talk where someone demonstrated a SDR setup doing mobile phone base station stuff by sneaking into what were ISM bands in Germany where he was that handsets would talk to because they were allocated as cellular phone spectrum in other parts of the world. Here in Australia we are limited and can't use the upper end of the 920MHz ISM band with LoRa devices, because Optus bought that spectrum for their phone network.
(Here in Aust4ralia we have other cellular spectrum and phone network problems, where a lot of older devices that support some 4 and/or 5G cannot reliably call 000 (our equivalent emergency number to the US 911), because the fall back to 3G when roaming onto other networks... A few people have died recently, and all the telcos are busy blocking a growing list of phones, mostly older Samsung ones if the noise in mainstream media here is accurate. I know my old but still otherwise functional Galaxy S6 Edge is not on the banned list.)
Edit: same as already posted hackaday, oop!
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vodafone-075375-Sure-Signal-V3/dp/B...
Most of the dates stated are just plain wrong.
The UK dates are completely wrong - by 5 years in most cases.
All of the UK's 2G networks are still running, and the last won't be switched off until at least 2030.
please note that the list is not fully up to date, eg. in Germany Voda and Telekom have said that they will sunset 2G in summer 2028.
Many countries/carriers in europe have already shut down 2G, many will shut it down in 2027. A few will keep it a few years more.
The whole point is to free up spectrum, how would that work if that spectrum is still in use for the American carriers in countries that shut down the service for domestic use? Why would service be maintained for such a niche usecase?
My fancy new 5G smartphone doesn’t work in rural parts of the country. We are going backwards.