5 ms·

If someone needs a phone like this for email and job searching and has no other option, 2G speeds will work. It’s not e-waste for the intended purpose. Guess h

If someone needs a phone like this for email and job searching and has no other option, 2G speeds will work. It’s not e-waste for the intended purpose. Guess how I know you've never actually tried this. Part of my job is testing the web sites I build in the terrible real-world conditions where our customers are. Places like machine rooms, deep basements, and small towns with only municipal or small-carrier 3G cell service. (In spite of what HN believes, there are plenty of places in America with 3G or even zero cell service.) 2G speeds will not work. The device or one of the essential thousands of processes in it will time out because they were designed by tech bubble tech bros who never use their apps in the real world.

zamadatix 7mo ago
> (In spite of what HN believes, there are plenty of places in America with 3G or even zero cell service.) 0 of course, but wasn't 3G all shut down in the US in 2022 to open up the airspace?
- reaperducer 7mo ago
  0 of course, but wasn't 3G all shut down in the US in 2022 to open up the airspace? One of those HN myths that comes from only being willing to Google (or ChatGPT) information, rather than encountering it in the real world. 3G still exists in rural and remote areas that no major carrier wants to serve, at least as of April, 2025 — the last time I did a round of real-world web testing. Next round is in September. Maybe with 5G in the cities, some hand-me-down 4G equipment has made it to the places where I test.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - coryrc 7mo ago
    That's weird, because it's directly contradicting that the carriers themselves say they have decommissioned it. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/plan-ahead-phase-out-3g-cellular-networks-and-service https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/plan-ahead-phase-out-3g...
    - filoleg 7mo ago
      I don't believe there is a contradiction. The FCC page you linked is talking about major carriers decommissioning 3G. The grandparent comment is talking about rural/remote areas that no major carrier served in the first place.
      - jazzyjackson 7mo ago
        I guess what I am getting from this thread is, there is 3G service out there in the wild. However, in locations where 4G and 5G is available, 3G has been phased out This doesn’t jibe with my experience trying to make phone calls on rural highways, where it seems there is no signal whatsoever more often than not. I suppose this could be because ATT-Verizon-T-Mobile used to have 2G in that area (which was discontinued — 900Mhz analog voice band, also decommissioned) has moved on and left swathes of the US without signal, whereas, certain areas (commenter omits an example) never were served by major telecoms and have “evolved” their tech more slowly, so 3G is not decommissioned in those places. In that sense yes there is no contradiction. It still feels like we’ve gone backwards since there are places I used to be able to make a phone call that are now considered remote area with satellite SOS being you’re only way to reach someone
      - coryrc 7mo ago
        The big-3 have nationwide coverage (well, at least 2 of them). But even beside that, AFAICT USCellular shut down 3G in January 2024, Appalachian Wireless in Dec 2022, Cellcom in Dec 2023, and C Spire sometime in 2022. I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA.
        filoleg 7mo ago
        > I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA. I gotchu, but I wanna be clear that it is all just fringe/regional operators (which is what the claim was originally about anyway, not about major telcos). I found a couple with user reports claiming 3G support still being active in random pockets of Wyoming/Colorado/etc. (but no confirmation on the official website), and one with confirmation on the official website. The one with the official confirmation is Union Wireless[0], with UMTS being a stand-in for 3G (color-coded in grey on their coverage map; mostly southern Wyoming plus parts of Colorado, Utah, and Idaho). I agree with your overall point though. Functionally, 3G is dead in the US. But factually, there are a few holdout fringe remote areas that still have it. 0. https://www.unionwireless.com/wireless-coverage https://www.unionwireless.com/wireless-coverage
kuschku 7mo ago
I used to have an extremely cheap phone plan that had 500MB data, then 64kbps for the rest of the month. You'd be surprised how far you can get with that. IRC works just fine (as long as you use Quassel w/ Quasseldroid), HN works well, so does reddit (via redreader). RSS readers and wikipedia work as well, and for general web browsing you can set up a readability proxy (basically Firefox' Reader Mode, but server-side). And of course email works really well, too.
- roywiggins 7mo ago
  The COTS solution for some web browsing is Opera Mini, which may still work? It also uses a proxy to prerender and compress websites, and worked ok at 2G speeds last I used it. It used to work well as a java applet and made the wider internet functional on feature phones. Very solid software. But as a practical matter, what people rely on phones for are services that are app-based. Good luck completing a Venmo transaction or any amount of banking.
  - duskdozer 7mo ago
    >Opera Mini I just tried to look for this and all links I'm seeing just forward to the main Opera page
    - kuschku 7mo ago
      Opera Mini, like actual Opera, was killed when Opera was purchased and relaunched as another Chrome clone.
- II2II 7mo ago
  Been there, done that, and all without the benefit of a home Internet connection. I also created a couple of scripts that I could run on my desktop computer to install new software or update my operating system. After running the scripts on my computer, I would wander over to the library with nothing more than my phone to download the packages along with grabbing some videos to watch offline. The issue isn't really living with 500 MB/month of data. For most people, it will simply be knowing that you can do that. The next issue they will face is having the technical ability to actually do so. Then, once you've done all of that, the question will remain: will they be interested in the stripped down Internet. A lot of us who frequent HN may be since the results will still reflect our interests. There are people on IRC who we would want to talk to. There is a slant towards tech sites with RSS. And so on. That isn't going to be reflected in sites targeted at a general audience.
MBCook 7mo ago
There is a spot near me near a local college that is a worthless dead zone for data. The signal is terrible, but it’s there. You can talk on the phone or send texts. Surfing is horrible. At times you get great speeds. Two seconds later it feels like slow dial up. Really that’s what it feels like most of the time, any kind of speed is the anomaly. As said in other comments, very few apps actually handle this well. They seem to expect that you either have a good connection or nothing. It’s been like that for a decade plus. I assume it’s just overloaded and will never be fixed.
qingcharles 7mo ago
Thank you. I often get people responding that 2G speed will work fine for email, chat, Google Maps etc. Maybe if I installed an IMAP client on their phone, maybe. But I can promise you from sitting with them dozens of times things like Google Maps are unusable once the connection is throttled. It might load some of the map, some of the time. But it never loads all of it and it is just plain unworkable. Even if it loads some of it it takes so long that the busses have gone past by the time they've tried to figure out what direction they need to go.
- strken 7mo ago
  Google maps works okay on slow connections if you download the tiles for the city you're in beforehand (not that non-technical unemployed people should be expected to do that). The worst thing is load balancers with a 10 or 20 second timeout, because there's almost nothing you can do other than use Opera Mini or something.
  - thaumasiotes 7mo ago
    > Google maps works okay on slow connections if you download the tiles for the city you're in beforehand At that point, why would you use Google Maps at all? Osmand will do the same thing, and requires no connection.
    - hn_acc1 7mo ago
      Because Google Maps is all they know? I've been on the web for 30+ years (wrote my own html home page by hand in 1995 while doing my master's) and have just now heard of "Osmand" for maybe the 2nd time in my life. The other being a few months ago. If I haven't heard of it, how would anyone else who isn't technical hear about it?
      - thaumasiotes 7mo ago
        > If I haven't heard of it, how would anyone else who isn't technical hear about it? If you assume that mapping services on a low-to-no bandwidth connection are important to them, they'll hear about it through word of mouth. Anything that solves a real problem will spread that way. Contrapositively, we can conclude that mapping isn't much of a problem for these people.
hedora 7mo ago
Here's my favorite example of this: https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/ https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/ When the power's out and broadband is down, if you are lucky the cell network is still up. However, everyone fails over to it simultaneously, so there's no way you'll get 2G speeds out of your 5G plan with 5 bars. I throttled my browser dev tools to 2G and clicked reload. After 2+ minutes, it popped up a "It looks like you are on a slow connection" modal (sometimes this loads on top of the outage info, obscuring the data you want!), so I clicked "Use low bandwidth version". After 51 seconds, the debugger says page load is finished (for the low bandwidth one), but the page is just a white background, and the browser "loading" animation is still running. After 2.17 more minutes, I get a form where you can type in an address + a bunch of irrelevant info. I typed an address, waited a minute, then typed this paragraph. After 1.5 minutes, it showed my address in the autocomplete menu, and I clicked it. 33 seconds later, it started loading a google maps ajax. 47 seconds after that, it displayed a header, with a white body. 1.33 minutes later, ignoring styling, it returned the string "power is on". (No map, etc, at this point.) Had this been a real outage in a storm, I'd be standing outside in the rain, or in a situation where getting cell coverage for more than 30 seconds at a time is impossible if you're holding the phone. I usually just put the phone on a carefully placed chair, then back away slowly. Anyway it takes 9 minutes under ideal scenarios (no drops) to send 30 bytes of address, and an 11 byte response. 44 bytes / 540 seconds = 0.08 bytes per second good put. For reference, voyager can send 20 bytes per second, so it's 250x faster than this. Morse code / telegraphs are typically sent at 1.5 words per minute, where a word is 15 characters, so 0.375 bytes per second = 4.6x faster. Remember, these are simulated conditions for the PG&E site. My record best time getting it to load during a major outage is 45 minutes, not 9.
cozzyd 7mo ago
I remember 10+ years ago I had to do my on-boarding paperwork from a research station on the Greenland ice sheet. Workday would just not work with the high latency (but otherwise, not terribly slow) connection. I had to remote desktop to a CONUS computer and use a browser there in order for it to work...
- qingcharles 7mo ago
  In 1999 I got a job to build one of the first streaming and download systems for the major record labels. Working from home as they didn't have offices yet. I'd been unemployed for months, and the day before I started my broadband got cut off for nonpayment. For the first few weeks all I had was my 9600bps serial connection to my Nokia 9000i. I had to remotely re-encode hundreds of CDs in 2Kbps audio so I could at least debug all my code and stream the music off the servers...
  - cozzyd 7mo ago
    What codec were you using? I didn't think mp3 went that low.

zamadatix 7mo ago

> (In spite of what HN believes, there are plenty of places in America with 3G or even zero cell service.) 0 of course, but wasn't 3G all shut down in the US in 2022 to open up the airspace?

reaperducer 7mo ago
0 of course, but wasn't 3G all shut down in the US in 2022 to open up the airspace? One of those HN myths that comes from only being willing to Google (or ChatGPT) information, rather than encountering it in the real world. 3G still exists in rural and remote areas that no major carrier wants to serve, at least as of April, 2025 — the last time I did a round of real-world web testing. Next round is in September. Maybe with 5G in the cities, some hand-me-down 4G equipment has made it to the places where I test.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- coryrc 7mo ago
  That's weird, because it's directly contradicting that the carriers themselves say they have decommissioned it. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/plan-ahead-phase-out-3g-cellular-networks-and-service https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/plan-ahead-phase-out-3g...
  - filoleg 7mo ago
    I don't believe there is a contradiction. The FCC page you linked is talking about major carriers decommissioning 3G. The grandparent comment is talking about rural/remote areas that no major carrier served in the first place.
    - jazzyjackson 7mo ago
      I guess what I am getting from this thread is, there is 3G service out there in the wild. However, in locations where 4G and 5G is available, 3G has been phased out This doesn’t jibe with my experience trying to make phone calls on rural highways, where it seems there is no signal whatsoever more often than not. I suppose this could be because ATT-Verizon-T-Mobile used to have 2G in that area (which was discontinued — 900Mhz analog voice band, also decommissioned) has moved on and left swathes of the US without signal, whereas, certain areas (commenter omits an example) never were served by major telecoms and have “evolved” their tech more slowly, so 3G is not decommissioned in those places. In that sense yes there is no contradiction. It still feels like we’ve gone backwards since there are places I used to be able to make a phone call that are now considered remote area with satellite SOS being you’re only way to reach someone
    - coryrc 7mo ago
      The big-3 have nationwide coverage (well, at least 2 of them). But even beside that, AFAICT USCellular shut down 3G in January 2024, Appalachian Wireless in Dec 2022, Cellcom in Dec 2023, and C Spire sometime in 2022. I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA.
      - filoleg 7mo ago
        > I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA. I gotchu, but I wanna be clear that it is all just fringe/regional operators (which is what the claim was originally about anyway, not about major telcos). I found a couple with user reports claiming 3G support still being active in random pockets of Wyoming/Colorado/etc. (but no confirmation on the official website), and one with confirmation on the official website. The one with the official confirmation is Union Wireless[0], with UMTS being a stand-in for 3G (color-coded in grey on their coverage map; mostly southern Wyoming plus parts of Colorado, Utah, and Idaho). I agree with your overall point though. Functionally, 3G is dead in the US. But factually, there are a few holdout fringe remote areas that still have it. 0. https://www.unionwireless.com/wireless-coverage https://www.unionwireless.com/wireless-coverage

kuschku 7mo ago

I used to have an extremely cheap phone plan that had 500MB data, then 64kbps for the rest of the month. You'd be surprised how far you can get with that. IRC works just fine (as long as you use Quassel w/ Quasseldroid), HN works well, so does reddit (via redreader). RSS readers and wikipedia work as well, and for general web browsing you can set up a readability proxy (basically Firefox' Reader Mode, but server-side). And of course email works really well, too.

roywiggins 7mo ago
The COTS solution for some web browsing is Opera Mini, which may still work? It also uses a proxy to prerender and compress websites, and worked ok at 2G speeds last I used it. It used to work well as a java applet and made the wider internet functional on feature phones. Very solid software. But as a practical matter, what people rely on phones for are services that are app-based. Good luck completing a Venmo transaction or any amount of banking.
- duskdozer 7mo ago
  >Opera Mini I just tried to look for this and all links I'm seeing just forward to the main Opera page
  - kuschku 7mo ago
    Opera Mini, like actual Opera, was killed when Opera was purchased and relaunched as another Chrome clone.
II2II 7mo ago
Been there, done that, and all without the benefit of a home Internet connection. I also created a couple of scripts that I could run on my desktop computer to install new software or update my operating system. After running the scripts on my computer, I would wander over to the library with nothing more than my phone to download the packages along with grabbing some videos to watch offline. The issue isn't really living with 500 MB/month of data. For most people, it will simply be knowing that you can do that. The next issue they will face is having the technical ability to actually do so. Then, once you've done all of that, the question will remain: will they be interested in the stripped down Internet. A lot of us who frequent HN may be since the results will still reflect our interests. There are people on IRC who we would want to talk to. There is a slant towards tech sites with RSS. And so on. That isn't going to be reflected in sites targeted at a general audience.

MBCook 7mo ago

There is a spot near me near a local college that is a worthless dead zone for data. The signal is terrible, but it’s there. You can talk on the phone or send texts. Surfing is horrible. At times you get great speeds. Two seconds later it feels like slow dial up. Really that’s what it feels like most of the time, any kind of speed is the anomaly. As said in other comments, very few apps actually handle this well. They seem to expect that you either have a good connection or nothing. It’s been like that for a decade plus. I assume it’s just overloaded and will never be fixed.

qingcharles 7mo ago

Thank you. I often get people responding that 2G speed will work fine for email, chat, Google Maps etc. Maybe if I installed an IMAP client on their phone, maybe. But I can promise you from sitting with them dozens of times things like Google Maps are unusable once the connection is throttled. It might load some of the map, some of the time. But it never loads all of it and it is just plain unworkable. Even if it loads some of it it takes so long that the busses have gone past by the time they've tried to figure out what direction they need to go.

strken 7mo ago
Google maps works okay on slow connections if you download the tiles for the city you're in beforehand (not that non-technical unemployed people should be expected to do that). The worst thing is load balancers with a 10 or 20 second timeout, because there's almost nothing you can do other than use Opera Mini or something.
- thaumasiotes 7mo ago
  > Google maps works okay on slow connections if you download the tiles for the city you're in beforehand At that point, why would you use Google Maps at all? Osmand will do the same thing, and requires no connection.
  - hn_acc1 7mo ago
    Because Google Maps is all they know? I've been on the web for 30+ years (wrote my own html home page by hand in 1995 while doing my master's) and have just now heard of "Osmand" for maybe the 2nd time in my life. The other being a few months ago. If I haven't heard of it, how would anyone else who isn't technical hear about it?
    - thaumasiotes 7mo ago
      > If I haven't heard of it, how would anyone else who isn't technical hear about it? If you assume that mapping services on a low-to-no bandwidth connection are important to them, they'll hear about it through word of mouth. Anything that solves a real problem will spread that way. Contrapositively, we can conclude that mapping isn't much of a problem for these people.

hedora 7mo ago

Here's my favorite example of this: https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/ https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/ When the power's out and broadband is down, if you are lucky the cell network is still up. However, everyone fails over to it simultaneously, so there's no way you'll get 2G speeds out of your 5G plan with 5 bars. I throttled my browser dev tools to 2G and clicked reload. After 2+ minutes, it popped up a "It looks like you are on a slow connection" modal (sometimes this loads on top of the outage info, obscuring the data you want!), so I clicked "Use low bandwidth version". After 51 seconds, the debugger says page load is finished (for the low bandwidth one), but the page is just a white background, and the browser "loading" animation is still running. After 2.17 more minutes, I get a form where you can type in an address + a bunch of irrelevant info. I typed an address, waited a minute, then typed this paragraph. After 1.5 minutes, it showed my address in the autocomplete menu, and I clicked it. 33 seconds later, it started loading a google maps ajax. 47 seconds after that, it displayed a header, with a white body. 1.33 minutes later, ignoring styling, it returned the string "power is on". (No map, etc, at this point.) Had this been a real outage in a storm, I'd be standing outside in the rain, or in a situation where getting cell coverage for more than 30 seconds at a time is impossible if you're holding the phone. I usually just put the phone on a carefully placed chair, then back away slowly. Anyway it takes 9 minutes under ideal scenarios (no drops) to send 30 bytes of address, and an 11 byte response. 44 bytes / 540 seconds = 0.08 bytes per second good put. For reference, voyager can send 20 bytes per second, so it's 250x faster than this. Morse code / telegraphs are typically sent at 1.5 words per minute, where a word is 15 characters, so 0.375 bytes per second = 4.6x faster. Remember, these are simulated conditions for the PG&E site. My record best time getting it to load during a major outage is 45 minutes, not 9.

cozzyd 7mo ago

I remember 10+ years ago I had to do my on-boarding paperwork from a research station on the Greenland ice sheet. Workday would just not work with the high latency (but otherwise, not terribly slow) connection. I had to remote desktop to a CONUS computer and use a browser there in order for it to work...

qingcharles 7mo ago
In 1999 I got a job to build one of the first streaming and download systems for the major record labels. Working from home as they didn't have offices yet. I'd been unemployed for months, and the day before I started my broadband got cut off for nonpayment. For the first few weeks all I had was my 9600bps serial connection to my Nokia 9000i. I had to remotely re-encode hundreds of CDs in 2Kbps audio so I could at least debug all my code and stream the music off the servers...
- cozzyd 7mo ago
  What codec were you using? I didn't think mp3 went that low.