Well they may say 4G phones are expensive but in my country older 2G phones are absurdly expensive claiming they are "collectors item" whilest used Google Nexus 5Xes sell off at 10$...
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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Well I got the Covid vaccine. I’m screwed I am 5g already.
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
I'm a ham radio operator; it just feels weird hearing someone call 400 MHz "long range." Above, say, 60 MHz I wouldn't count on anything beyond line-of-sight anyway, though I suppose the lower in the UHF band you are the more likely you are to punch through leaves and such.
hahah everything is relative I guess.
I did once talk to Ukraine from some woods in North Carolina on 20 meters (~14 MHz) So when you say "long range radio" to me I think in hemispheres.
I live outside of a big city in the UK. Many times I can ONLY get 2G.
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.
Not yet another protocol invading me brain!?? For all I know the different pattern of signal does things to my delicate nets.
I already had to contend with the fridge and garage door
Recovery from brain injury?
/sorry
So is the difference between 2g, 3g, 4g and 5g that they use different channels/frequencies, different communication protocols, or both?
Both of those, and also different signal modulation.
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.
Both, really. There's been encoding improvements every generation, but they also use different slices of the spectrum.
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’m in Sweden too. I was considering buying a used car made in 2023. It uses 2G/3G. It has some connected services I actually wanted to use. And well, the ecall obviously. It’s really not an old car yet, but it becomes obsolete already.
On the manufacturer’s website they say that new car models need to have 4G/5G only by 2026. And starting 2027 all cars sold must have it. 2027 is also when they expect 2G to be fully shut down in the country. This timeline makes no sense for devices with a long life span.
In the website they also say you wouldn’t fail inspection though. But honestly I don’t care too much about that, since I actually care about ecall and some other connected services.
I hope my 2023 car only have it so I can get rid of the spyware in my car. In this case obsolescence feels fine
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.
You will be surprised how many old people rely on health monitoring devices that use 2G to send basic data.
Not just old people. I had a heart monitor a couple years ago that’s only made for 2G.
Alright maybe I’m getting old but that’s not the point.
When I was visiting the Caribbean they also had a lot of 2G infrastructure still operating.
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