11 ms·

2.7M Brits still use a 3G only handset

113 points by adrianvincent 3y ago

1oooqooq 3y ago
a yes, the great tech-poor divide nobody cares when talking about digital central bank currencies or digital government etc.
- tifik 3y ago
  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.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > 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 This is a strange assumption given it has zero historical basis and is, by and large, a modern invention.
    - tifik 3y ago
      Depends on how you define 'technology'. When the government needs you to fill out a form, you can go to their office and they provide the printed form and a pen. Paper and printing are human inventions, therefor I would consider them 'technology' for purposes of this debate. That said, I know it's a bit of a leap from paper to internet access. In my country at least, I can say confidently that there is a law mandating free access to government services. At least such services that you are required by law to interact with.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > you can go to their office and they provide the printed form and a pen Getting to a government office was historically a barrier. It still is in much of the world. > there is a law mandating free access to government services To be clear, I think this is a good thing. I just don't think it's reasonable to assume it to be true.
        tifik 3y ago
        > Getting to a government office was historically a barrier. That is a very good point, and something I did not include in my logic. Thanks for pointing that out.
        JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        It's actually wild to see, across history, how cost of travel was used as a gating mechanism. The example that comes to mind is the Roman Tribal Assembly [1]. While on paper it was egalitarian, in practice only the elites could afford to keep criss-crossing Italy to elect low-ranking Senators. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_assembly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_assembly
      - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
        Are things like marriage licenses, driving licenses, registering land ownership, passports all free-gratis to acquire then? Which country? You can't in general attend government offices in the UK. You can't rock up with your tax return, or apply for a passport, say. You can get paper forms from the Post Office, or sent out from the gov service itself (sometimes, some are digital only) and most libraries (and some other community centres) offer help to access online services.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    The lesser known Obama phone program got devices to 20 million Americans in order to facilitate digital interaction. https://www.obamaphone.com/ https://www.obamaphone.com/
    - kube-system 3y ago
      What you're talking about is the Lifeline program, which was established in 1985 and expanded to include cell phones under the Bush administration. The changes took effect later during the Obama administration, and so it got the nickname "Obama phone" by some. But he didn't have anything to do with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeline_(FCC_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeline_(FCC_program) What you've linked is some unaffiliated site, the official website of the administrator of the program is here: https://www.lifelinesupport.org/ https://www.lifelinesupport.org/
      - fragmede 3y ago
        TIL, thank you!
  - peebeebee 3y ago
    In Belgium, most (big) banks are downscaling physical servicepoints so much it sometimes is almost impossible for people to choose to do business in person. In think in 10 years you will have almost no real bank tellers anymore. That's no problem for most of the people, but I don't think that the right thing to do in the broader sense. There are lots of (technology) illiterate people that needs some kind of physical service.
    - tifik 3y ago
      I agree that it would suck for tech non-savvy people, but at the same time the literacy of general population with any technology naturally improves as time passes. Of course, while there is still a big enough chunk of people that do need a require (or just prefer) a particular way of communicating, it should be generally available at a good-enough level of convenience. The key is of course to only start scaling it back at the appropriate time, at which there is so few people that they can be considered outliers (and I mean actual, statistical outliers, not 'whoever the government doesn't consider important enough'). But all of this is of course just like my opinion man. Just a very interesting topic to think about.
    - simsla 3y ago
      In Belgium, I've noticed a general "de-servicing" across industries. - Bank offices (and ATMs) disappearing. - Post offices disappearing. - Customer service disappearing (phone especially) in lieu of the always useless "check our frequently asked questions / forums" - Cashiers disappearing in lieu of self checkout. I'm sure it's not just Belgium. The problem appears to be that there's no big enough incentive to service the long-tail (P90) once most day-to-day stuff can be done by yourself, usually digital. Service as collateral damage of efficiency. Should we ask the government to ensure that any company providing critical services (banking, telecommunications, distributing food) offers a minimum level of service? Because without outside incentive I only see us going further down this road.
      - imp0cat 3y ago
        It's not just Belgium, it's everywhere now. Though I must I admit I much prefer self-checkout when shopping. The queues are much faster.
  - lmm 3y ago
    > 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. When I applied for my Irish passport, the only way to inquire about the process of my application was via Twitter. (They had something that superficially looked like a contact widget on their website, but it was nonfunctional)
    - tifik 3y ago
      That sounds pretty shocking. Was that during the covid lockdowns or is that just standard procedure?
      - lmm 3y ago
        It was pre-covid, although during a time of particularly high applications (post-Brexit).
    - chrisbolt 3y ago
      https://www.ireland.ie/en/dfa/passports/contact-us/ https://www.ireland.ie/en/dfa/passports/contact-us/
      - lmm 3y ago
        Yeah, Twitter and the "WebChat" were the only options there when I was applying and the webchat didn't work. Glad to see they've added a phone number now.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    > since you always have the free option to do your business in person. The free option can cost a lot. Digitalization is pushed because the government want to reduce "first level support". You get to talk to robots, for hours and then get an appointment in months.
  - gambiting 3y ago
    >>you always have the free option to do your business in person. I guess you don't actually live in the UK then. There is nowhere to go "in person" to interact with HMRC for instance. You can still send them paper forms for most things, but the result will be saved in your online HMRC profile, so you haven't bypassed anything. >>I would assume a basic free option would have to be provided to legal resident of such country. You'd assume wrong. The argument is that all of these options are "free" so what are you complaining about. Same thing is happening with banks - branches are closing down across the country in droves, with a lot of people reporting that they now have to travel 1h+ to their nearest branch if they need to do something in person(and annoyingly banks themselves force that - you can't deposit a cheque over £500 online for instance, you have to do it in person for some idiotic reason)
- fsckboy 3y ago
  >the great tech-poor divide nobody cares in the US, mentally ill drug addicted homeless people living on the street generally have smartphones
  - NoboruWataya 3y ago
    I suspect that in the developed world age is a better predictor than financial means of whether someone has an internet-connected smartphone, given how cheap smartphones can be these days. That said, I still think that "freedom from tech" is an important social issue, regardless of how society tends to be divided on it.
- alkonaut 3y ago
  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.
sheepscreek 3y ago
It’s a positive thing, tbh. I wish the number was bigger. Our desire to switch to the hottest new thing has a significant environmental impact. People don’t need the fastest available mobile internet for checking mails or streaming videos at 1 Mbps. They don’t need the fastest PCs for using Google docs. We don’t need massive pickup trucks for doing grocery runs or even hauling passengers around. It’s fair for anyone to disagree, but I wanted to put this thought out there.
- cogman10 3y ago
  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.
  - wkjagt 3y ago
    It’s not just the materials in the phone itself. It’s the whole production process.
- vel0city 3y ago
  Operating slower RF equipment isn't just affecting the single end user though. That user is affecting everyone else wanting to share that spectrum.
  - bobdvb 3y ago
    I get the argument, but the networks seem to be operating quite inefficiently anyway. They have been given a tonne of spectrum over the years and yet they don't tend to address areas of concern over coverage. They could put in more small cells to improve coverage, but they just want to maximise the utilisation their wide area coverage frequencies. I live in an area where you'd expect fantastic coverage, close to a globally significant city and yet not too dense population. A 5G speed test will often get you DSL speeds. Leaving a few channels, or even allocating guard bands to low power 3G seems like it won't significantly impact the networks and at worse inspire them to invest better in their networks. Scarcity drives innovation afterall.
ksec 3y ago
To put in a little context. First 4G iPhone was iPhone 5, released on Sep 2012. 4G here is straightly LTE+ and not anything else. And the first 4G enabled Smartphone was released in 2010 by HTC. By 2015. All Smartphone from major manufacture, including Apple has a top to bottom LTE capable Line Up. i.e If the phone is 3G only, it is either very old or specifically designed for Voice and SMS only aka old Nokia non-smart phone.
lxgr 3y ago
I wonder why some countries are shutting down 3G but are keeping 2G around for several more years (UK, Germany), while others do the opposite, and yet others can get away with turning off both and going 4G/5G only (like the US). Maybe it's a function of what type of M2M devices were rolled out most commonly in a country? For example, parking meters and vending machines often communciate via SMS in Germany; that works on 2G, so they might not even have a 3G modem. On the other hand, I've seen a mobile payment terminal with a built-in 3G modem (but no LTE) that basically became obsolete with the 3G shutdown, since it falls back to GPRS which is hopelessly overloaded and/or just too slow for applications not geared towards it.
eunos 3y ago
End-user device is one thing, but much worrying is if any critical system still using only 3G.
- woleium 3y ago
  parking meters, apparently.
  - aziaziazi 3y ago
    I won’t say parking meters are critical!
    - pmontra 3y ago
      They are to the companies or local administrations making money from them. City councils have some leverage on mobile operators by the means of national governments. In general, each industry or other organizations hit by changes will be vocal against those changes. Countries implement them when everybody is OK with them or when the organizations not OK with them are politically too weak to matter.
      - aziaziazi 3y ago
        While all you say is very true, that does not make them critical. Critical stuff is what those people/org will buy with the money: clean water, food, antibiotics… In a harsh environment (war, crisis, epidemic…) you can give up paying the parking but you still need to eat. This is critical.
      - forgotusername6 3y ago
        They've just removed parking meters in a lot of places near me. Parking apps or pay by phone only.
- pajko 3y ago
  Critical systems are using or will fallback to 2G, which will stay with us forever. The bandwidth is not required there anyway.
richjdsmith 3y ago
Has 4G/5G improved? When I lived in the UK (Midlands until 2019) it was entirely unreliable. I'd wager 75% of my connection was on 3G as soon as I was more than 3Km from a town's high street. I can say with confidence that the shift from 4G/LTE to 5G where I live now in British Columbia (Canada) mountains is not fun. It's significantly less reliable. I understand that its 10x faster, but I'd much prefer reliable over fast when it comes to mobile phones.
- odiroot 3y ago
  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.
- hedora 3y ago
  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.
- nicoburns 3y ago
  Whether it matches the 3G coverage you had, I'm not sure. But in general, yes, 4G coverage has improved significantly since 2019.
- toast0 3y ago
  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.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    The 800 MHz band helps a lot to increase coverage, I think. Used to carry analogue TV signals.
- thecopy 3y ago
hkt 3y ago
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.
- nradov 3y ago
  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.
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    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.
  - OliveMate 3y ago
    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 https://youtu.be/aFsOhJgCSpw
- mobiuscog 3y ago
  Landlines are being taken away by 2025.
  - Symbiote 3y ago
    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-voice-and-the-landline-phone-switch-off-what-it-means-for-you-aPSOH8k1i6Vv https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/broadband/article/digital-vo...
thorum 3y ago
> 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?
- Longhanks 3y ago
  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.
  - ubercow13 3y ago
    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?
    - lxgr 3y ago
      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.
  - TheCoreh 3y ago
    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.
pajko 3y ago
3G has been recently switched off in the most (or all by now?) part of Hungary. I have thought that the bands get reused for 4G, but no change so far. Probably the remaining 2G occupies the same bands or whatever. Or they have gone with 5G, while all the providers banish prepaid users from using 5G, so thanks for nothing. Anyway, the biggest downside is that where the 4G coverage sucks, I'm seeing the nightmarish EDGE on my phone instead of HSDPA+. And it happens way too many times... Sometimes it happens while just passing a corner in the streets, and sometimes it takes too much time for the phone to recover to 4G+.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- wkat4242 3y ago
  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.
  - ErneX 3y ago
    simyo supposedly will have prepaid 5G by the end of this month.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Ah ok, thanks! Not really a fan of MVNOs though. But I guess Orange won't be far behind then.
- yreg 3y ago
  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.
Michaelhartnett 3y ago
[dead]
pipeline_peak 3y ago
Absolutely tragic…don’t they know it’s within cultural norms to switch phones every 2 years?
- lxgr 3y ago
  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.
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
> 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. I would guess that a large subset of those handsets are for 'emergency' use. Phones kept in car glove boxes and hand bags and rarely or infrequently used and never for internet.
citrin_ru 3y ago
Relying on pools to get the data doesn’t seem very reliable. Phone carriers should have good numbers on how many users connect using 3G form base station logs. But may be they have no incentive to share because it could create pressure to delay 3G sunset.
palmfacehn 3y ago
Don't we get enough Internet on the desktop?
- crtasm 3y ago
  What's a desktop? (that is to say, majority of people only have a phone these days)
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    I really, extremely doubt that's the case (at least in Western countries). Practically everyone I know (including elderly relatives) at least have a laptop as well as a phone, and quite a few have a dedicated desktop. And that's only counting personal devices.
bArray 3y ago
> 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. My bet would be that these are mostly devices given to children to watch Youtube and what-not. > However, calls and texts will continue to work despite the 3G switch off, as 2G won’t be fully switched off until 2033 the latest. This is because 2G is still used for critical infrastructure, including legacy connectivity solutions that typically have a longer product life. Is it really that much overhead to keep 2G networks operating? It's very difficult to get behind any type of cellular technology when tomorrow it could be turned off.
- afavour 3y ago
  > 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.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    It's more that it's a completely different technological paradigm. 2G is deeply based on ideas of circuit switching, not just on the radio link, but also in the core network. It's possible to emulate all that at various levels, but that doesn't come for free (in terms of complexity, hardware, and spectrum). Maybe in 10 years it'll be cheap enough that it'll just be done in the spare cycles of some 6G or 7G SDR network, though, if that's worth the extra spectral inefficiency.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  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?
  - bArray 3y ago
    I have a 3G device still able to watch YT and a very old Kindle Fire that has NewPipe [1] installed for watching YT in bed (whilst my phone is on charge). I don't see why not either - if the device was capable of H264 when it was released, why not now? [1] https://newpipe.net/ https://newpipe.net/
zelphirkalt 3y ago
It is kind sad and funny at the same time, that in Germany I run around with 3G in major cities, which I have had in China in the middle of nowhere in probably better quality, 5 years ago.
- MilaM 3y ago
  All three networks have disabled 3G access in 2021, as far as I know.
Symbiote 3y ago
> The survey also reveals 13% of people are unaware if their phone actually supports 4G or 5G Include me in that. I have an old phone with a discount SIM installed. I only use it for certain international calls. Wikipedia and elsewhere describe it as "GSM / HSPA+ / LTE", and then explain that LTE "is also called 3.95G and has been marketed as 4G LTE and Advanced 4G" etc.
- lxgr 3y ago
  When network operators or phone manufacturers say 4G, they usually mean LTE, yes.

113 points by adrianvincent 3y ago

a yes, the great tech-poor divide nobody cares when talking about digital central bank currencies or digital government etc.

tifik 3y ago
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.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > 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 This is a strange assumption given it has zero historical basis and is, by and large, a modern invention.
  - tifik 3y ago
    Depends on how you define 'technology'. When the government needs you to fill out a form, you can go to their office and they provide the printed form and a pen. Paper and printing are human inventions, therefor I would consider them 'technology' for purposes of this debate. That said, I know it's a bit of a leap from paper to internet access. In my country at least, I can say confidently that there is a law mandating free access to government services. At least such services that you are required by law to interact with.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > you can go to their office and they provide the printed form and a pen Getting to a government office was historically a barrier. It still is in much of the world. > there is a law mandating free access to government services To be clear, I think this is a good thing. I just don't think it's reasonable to assume it to be true.
      - tifik 3y ago
        > Getting to a government office was historically a barrier. That is a very good point, and something I did not include in my logic. Thanks for pointing that out.
        JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        It's actually wild to see, across history, how cost of travel was used as a gating mechanism. The example that comes to mind is the Roman Tribal Assembly [1]. While on paper it was egalitarian, in practice only the elites could afford to keep criss-crossing Italy to elect low-ranking Senators. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_assembly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_assembly
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      Are things like marriage licenses, driving licenses, registering land ownership, passports all free-gratis to acquire then? Which country? You can't in general attend government offices in the UK. You can't rock up with your tax return, or apply for a passport, say. You can get paper forms from the Post Office, or sent out from the gov service itself (sometimes, some are digital only) and most libraries (and some other community centres) offer help to access online services.
- fragmede 3y ago
  The lesser known Obama phone program got devices to 20 million Americans in order to facilitate digital interaction. https://www.obamaphone.com/ https://www.obamaphone.com/
  - kube-system 3y ago
    What you're talking about is the Lifeline program, which was established in 1985 and expanded to include cell phones under the Bush administration. The changes took effect later during the Obama administration, and so it got the nickname "Obama phone" by some. But he didn't have anything to do with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeline_(FCC_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeline_(FCC_program) What you've linked is some unaffiliated site, the official website of the administrator of the program is here: https://www.lifelinesupport.org/ https://www.lifelinesupport.org/
    - fragmede 3y ago
      TIL, thank you!
- peebeebee 3y ago
  In Belgium, most (big) banks are downscaling physical servicepoints so much it sometimes is almost impossible for people to choose to do business in person. In think in 10 years you will have almost no real bank tellers anymore. That's no problem for most of the people, but I don't think that the right thing to do in the broader sense. There are lots of (technology) illiterate people that needs some kind of physical service.
  - tifik 3y ago
    I agree that it would suck for tech non-savvy people, but at the same time the literacy of general population with any technology naturally improves as time passes. Of course, while there is still a big enough chunk of people that do need a require (or just prefer) a particular way of communicating, it should be generally available at a good-enough level of convenience. The key is of course to only start scaling it back at the appropriate time, at which there is so few people that they can be considered outliers (and I mean actual, statistical outliers, not 'whoever the government doesn't consider important enough'). But all of this is of course just like my opinion man. Just a very interesting topic to think about.
  - simsla 3y ago
    In Belgium, I've noticed a general "de-servicing" across industries. - Bank offices (and ATMs) disappearing. - Post offices disappearing. - Customer service disappearing (phone especially) in lieu of the always useless "check our frequently asked questions / forums" - Cashiers disappearing in lieu of self checkout. I'm sure it's not just Belgium. The problem appears to be that there's no big enough incentive to service the long-tail (P90) once most day-to-day stuff can be done by yourself, usually digital. Service as collateral damage of efficiency. Should we ask the government to ensure that any company providing critical services (banking, telecommunications, distributing food) offers a minimum level of service? Because without outside incentive I only see us going further down this road.
    - imp0cat 3y ago
      It's not just Belgium, it's everywhere now. Though I must I admit I much prefer self-checkout when shopping. The queues are much faster.
- lmm 3y ago
  > 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. When I applied for my Irish passport, the only way to inquire about the process of my application was via Twitter. (They had something that superficially looked like a contact widget on their website, but it was nonfunctional)
  - tifik 3y ago
    That sounds pretty shocking. Was that during the covid lockdowns or is that just standard procedure?
    - lmm 3y ago
      It was pre-covid, although during a time of particularly high applications (post-Brexit).
  - chrisbolt 3y ago
    https://www.ireland.ie/en/dfa/passports/contact-us/ https://www.ireland.ie/en/dfa/passports/contact-us/
    - lmm 3y ago
      Yeah, Twitter and the "WebChat" were the only options there when I was applying and the webchat didn't work. Glad to see they've added a phone number now.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > since you always have the free option to do your business in person. The free option can cost a lot. Digitalization is pushed because the government want to reduce "first level support". You get to talk to robots, for hours and then get an appointment in months.
- gambiting 3y ago
  >>you always have the free option to do your business in person. I guess you don't actually live in the UK then. There is nowhere to go "in person" to interact with HMRC for instance. You can still send them paper forms for most things, but the result will be saved in your online HMRC profile, so you haven't bypassed anything. >>I would assume a basic free option would have to be provided to legal resident of such country. You'd assume wrong. The argument is that all of these options are "free" so what are you complaining about. Same thing is happening with banks - branches are closing down across the country in droves, with a lot of people reporting that they now have to travel 1h+ to their nearest branch if they need to do something in person(and annoyingly banks themselves force that - you can't deposit a cheque over £500 online for instance, you have to do it in person for some idiotic reason)
fsckboy 3y ago
>the great tech-poor divide nobody cares in the US, mentally ill drug addicted homeless people living on the street generally have smartphones
- NoboruWataya 3y ago
  I suspect that in the developed world age is a better predictor than financial means of whether someone has an internet-connected smartphone, given how cheap smartphones can be these days. That said, I still think that "freedom from tech" is an important social issue, regardless of how society tends to be divided on it.
alkonaut 3y ago
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.

sheepscreek 3y ago

It’s a positive thing, tbh. I wish the number was bigger. Our desire to switch to the hottest new thing has a significant environmental impact. People don’t need the fastest available mobile internet for checking mails or streaming videos at 1 Mbps. They don’t need the fastest PCs for using Google docs. We don’t need massive pickup trucks for doing grocery runs or even hauling passengers around. It’s fair for anyone to disagree, but I wanted to put this thought out there.

cogman10 3y ago
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.
- wkjagt 3y ago
  It’s not just the materials in the phone itself. It’s the whole production process.
vel0city 3y ago
Operating slower RF equipment isn't just affecting the single end user though. That user is affecting everyone else wanting to share that spectrum.
- bobdvb 3y ago
  I get the argument, but the networks seem to be operating quite inefficiently anyway. They have been given a tonne of spectrum over the years and yet they don't tend to address areas of concern over coverage. They could put in more small cells to improve coverage, but they just want to maximise the utilisation their wide area coverage frequencies. I live in an area where you'd expect fantastic coverage, close to a globally significant city and yet not too dense population. A 5G speed test will often get you DSL speeds. Leaving a few channels, or even allocating guard bands to low power 3G seems like it won't significantly impact the networks and at worse inspire them to invest better in their networks. Scarcity drives innovation afterall.

ksec 3y ago

To put in a little context. First 4G iPhone was iPhone 5, released on Sep 2012. 4G here is straightly LTE+ and not anything else. And the first 4G enabled Smartphone was released in 2010 by HTC. By 2015. All Smartphone from major manufacture, including Apple has a top to bottom LTE capable Line Up. i.e If the phone is 3G only, it is either very old or specifically designed for Voice and SMS only aka old Nokia non-smart phone.

lxgr 3y ago

I wonder why some countries are shutting down 3G but are keeping 2G around for several more years (UK, Germany), while others do the opposite, and yet others can get away with turning off both and going 4G/5G only (like the US). Maybe it's a function of what type of M2M devices were rolled out most commonly in a country? For example, parking meters and vending machines often communciate via SMS in Germany; that works on 2G, so they might not even have a 3G modem. On the other hand, I've seen a mobile payment terminal with a built-in 3G modem (but no LTE) that basically became obsolete with the 3G shutdown, since it falls back to GPRS which is hopelessly overloaded and/or just too slow for applications not geared towards it.

eunos 3y ago

End-user device is one thing, but much worrying is if any critical system still using only 3G.

woleium 3y ago
parking meters, apparently.
- aziaziazi 3y ago
  I won’t say parking meters are critical!
  - pmontra 3y ago
    They are to the companies or local administrations making money from them. City councils have some leverage on mobile operators by the means of national governments. In general, each industry or other organizations hit by changes will be vocal against those changes. Countries implement them when everybody is OK with them or when the organizations not OK with them are politically too weak to matter.
    - aziaziazi 3y ago
      While all you say is very true, that does not make them critical. Critical stuff is what those people/org will buy with the money: clean water, food, antibiotics… In a harsh environment (war, crisis, epidemic…) you can give up paying the parking but you still need to eat. This is critical.
    - forgotusername6 3y ago
      They've just removed parking meters in a lot of places near me. Parking apps or pay by phone only.
pajko 3y ago
Critical systems are using or will fallback to 2G, which will stay with us forever. The bandwidth is not required there anyway.

richjdsmith 3y ago

Has 4G/5G improved? When I lived in the UK (Midlands until 2019) it was entirely unreliable. I'd wager 75% of my connection was on 3G as soon as I was more than 3Km from a town's high street. I can say with confidence that the shift from 4G/LTE to 5G where I live now in British Columbia (Canada) mountains is not fun. It's significantly less reliable. I understand that its 10x faster, but I'd much prefer reliable over fast when it comes to mobile phones.

odiroot 3y ago
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.
hedora 3y ago
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.
nicoburns 3y ago
Whether it matches the 3G coverage you had, I'm not sure. But in general, yes, 4G coverage has improved significantly since 2019.
toast0 3y ago
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.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  The 800 MHz band helps a lot to increase coverage, I think. Used to carry analogue TV signals.
thecopy 3y ago

hkt 3y ago

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.

nradov 3y ago
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.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  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.
- OliveMate 3y ago
  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 https://youtu.be/aFsOhJgCSpw
mobiuscog 3y ago
Landlines are being taken away by 2025.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  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-voice-and-the-landline-phone-switch-off-what-it-means-for-you-aPSOH8k1i6Vv https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/broadband/article/digital-vo...

thorum 3y ago

> 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?

Longhanks 3y ago
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.
- ubercow13 3y ago
  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?
  - lxgr 3y ago
    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.
- TheCoreh 3y ago
  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.

pajko 3y ago

3G has been recently switched off in the most (or all by now?) part of Hungary. I have thought that the bands get reused for 4G, but no change so far. Probably the remaining 2G occupies the same bands or whatever. Or they have gone with 5G, while all the providers banish prepaid users from using 5G, so thanks for nothing. Anyway, the biggest downside is that where the 4G coverage sucks, I'm seeing the nightmarish EDGE on my phone instead of HSDPA+. And it happens way too many times... Sometimes it happens while just passing a corner in the streets, and sometimes it takes too much time for the phone to recover to 4G+.

deleted 3y ago
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wkat4242 3y ago
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.
- ErneX 3y ago
  simyo supposedly will have prepaid 5G by the end of this month.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Ah ok, thanks! Not really a fan of MVNOs though. But I guess Orange won't be far behind then.
yreg 3y ago
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.

Michaelhartnett 3y ago

[dead]

pipeline_peak 3y ago

Absolutely tragic…don’t they know it’s within cultural norms to switch phones every 2 years?

lxgr 3y ago
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.

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

> 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. I would guess that a large subset of those handsets are for 'emergency' use. Phones kept in car glove boxes and hand bags and rarely or infrequently used and never for internet.

citrin_ru 3y ago

Relying on pools to get the data doesn’t seem very reliable. Phone carriers should have good numbers on how many users connect using 3G form base station logs. But may be they have no incentive to share because it could create pressure to delay 3G sunset.

palmfacehn 3y ago

Don't we get enough Internet on the desktop?

crtasm 3y ago
What's a desktop? (that is to say, majority of people only have a phone these days)
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  I really, extremely doubt that's the case (at least in Western countries). Practically everyone I know (including elderly relatives) at least have a laptop as well as a phone, and quite a few have a dedicated desktop. And that's only counting personal devices.

bArray 3y ago

> 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. My bet would be that these are mostly devices given to children to watch Youtube and what-not. > However, calls and texts will continue to work despite the 3G switch off, as 2G won’t be fully switched off until 2033 the latest. This is because 2G is still used for critical infrastructure, including legacy connectivity solutions that typically have a longer product life. Is it really that much overhead to keep 2G networks operating? It's very difficult to get behind any type of cellular technology when tomorrow it could be turned off.

afavour 3y ago
> 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.
- lxgr 3y ago
  It's more that it's a completely different technological paradigm. 2G is deeply based on ideas of circuit switching, not just on the radio link, but also in the core network. It's possible to emulate all that at various levels, but that doesn't come for free (in terms of complexity, hardware, and spectrum). Maybe in 10 years it'll be cheap enough that it'll just be done in the spare cycles of some 6G or 7G SDR network, though, if that's worth the extra spectral inefficiency.
ffgjgf1 3y ago
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?
- bArray 3y ago
  I have a 3G device still able to watch YT and a very old Kindle Fire that has NewPipe [1] installed for watching YT in bed (whilst my phone is on charge). I don't see why not either - if the device was capable of H264 when it was released, why not now? [1] https://newpipe.net/ https://newpipe.net/

zelphirkalt 3y ago

It is kind sad and funny at the same time, that in Germany I run around with 3G in major cities, which I have had in China in the middle of nowhere in probably better quality, 5 years ago.

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

Symbiote 3y ago

> The survey also reveals 13% of people are unaware if their phone actually supports 4G or 5G Include me in that. I have an old phone with a discount SIM installed. I only use it for certain international calls. Wikipedia and elsewhere describe it as "GSM / HSPA+ / LTE", and then explain that LTE "is also called 3.95G and has been marketed as 4G LTE and Advanced 4G" etc.

lxgr 3y ago
When network operators or phone manufacturers say 4G, they usually mean LTE, yes.