Global leap to 4G and 5G would cut off phone access for millions of vulnerable people.
- Telecom companies aim to profit from the 2G-to-5G transition as governments worldwide face pressure to free up mobile spectrum.
- Vietnam is the latest country to shut down 2G by offering free 4G phones to the poor.
- India and South Africa have expressed concern that the strategy would cut off phone access for millions of vulnerable people.
So is the difference between 2g, 3g, 4g and 5g that they use different channels/frequencies, different communication protocols, or both?
There’s also changing from circuit to packet switching, which also drastically changes how the handover process works.
tl;Dr - handover in 5G is buggy and barely works. The whole thing of switching from one service area to another in the middle of a call is held together by hopes and dreams.
A big blocker that the article surprisingly doesn’t talk about is tons of IoT stuff that uses 2G and 3G. Stuff like alarm systems, emergency phones, street light control, cars etc. Here in Sweden there was recently a report that thousands of elevators have emergency phones using 2G and 3G, and if the network is shut down you would no longer be allowed to use those elevators. And since 2018 all new cars in the EU has to have eCall, which alerts emergency services on a crash. Many of these use 2G and 3G, and if it stops working the car won’t pass inspection so you’ll no longer be allowed to drive it.
I have a feeling we’re going to regret a lot of the “From 201x all new cars have to have ibuttfuck.” It’s like paying to be assimilated by the goddamn Borg.
what benefits does 5g offer over 2g?
5g > 2g if g is positive
Aktchually g gets simplified so it’s 5 > 2 for any value
What if g is zero?
Zero g is only available in special airplanes and in space, so not much of a worry for most people.
Damn it! I was dreaming of one day scrolling Lemmy on a 0g connection. You ruined my dreams and I am sad now.
We switched off 3G this year in the UK and my brothers phone stopped being able to make calls. He was using a 6 year old high-end Android phone, but it was from just before the cutoff where you could turn on VoLTE (calls over 4G).
Thankfully, I had a spare phone from the next year after that to hand him, and that one could work with some hidden menu (the type you type into your dialer) hacking.
Why couldn’t you turn off 3G on that old phone via that same hidden menu? Or how come the phone didn’t even recognize that it can fall back to 2G…
2G is also gone.Edit: it’s not gone just yet. Not sure why the phone didn’t try to fall back to 2G.https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/coverage-and-speeds/3g-switch-off/
The old phone was a couple years into 4G existing but before we started to send voice over it.
I assume it just wasn’t in the OS-level code. It only went up to Android 11. We could have tried LineageOS but that would have required a bunch of work including wiping the phone.
Either way, we checked and the option just wasn’t there.
Were they / are they on the 3 network?
If so, that’s why because 3 has never had a 2G network at all ;)
Well 2g is good because it reaches be further doesn’t it? Say if you’re in the wilderness, there’s a slim chance 2G might work
the 5g standard includes many frequencies, including long range 2g-like ~400Mhz ones
You will be surprised how many old people rely on health monitoring devices that use 2G to send basic data.
I’m in a recovery group and someone shared how dangerous 5G was and that they have to move again because there is too much 5G in their area…. I’m still dumbfounded.
I am still baffled by these idiots after I learned how 5g works. It isn’t just frequencies increases (I could see why someone might be sceptical about this one). The main difference is simply using another protocol which allows to send more bits with a single signal.
If there is any thought to it, it usually goes something like “Radio is/was fine because it’s kilo/megahertz, Wifi/5G is gigahertz waves of electromagnetic radiation.(?!?!)”
Could always point to the Terahertz electromagnetic radiation source plugged into their nearest lightbulb socket and ask how that doesn’t hurt them.
