UK Government to Shut Down GSM Networks

An anonymous reader writes "Mobile Gazette is reporting that the British government wants to shut down the UK's GSM networks next year and re-use the frequencies for gambling terminals and a new citizen surveillance program extending the use of the new compulsory ID cards. Although we should perhaps welcome the move away from old-style 2G mobile phone networks, there are perhaps a few worrying things about the new "Big Brother" citizen monitoring that the government is proposing to put in."

Comments

Please, for the love of all that you hold dear

[Tim C]

Stop it.

April Fools Day is a nice, fun day on which you can be irreverant. It's fun to say or publish something that seems plausible, slipped in amongst everything else, and see how many people fall for it. That's great, it's traditional, it's a fun thing to do.

This is beyond stupid. No-one with half a brain in their head would fall for this. Everyone in the UK has a mobile phone. (Ok, not everyone, but those who don't are negligible in number compared to those who do) There have been BBC news stories about mobiles marketed at five year olds for fuck's sake, that's how saturated the market is here.

There are currently tens of millions of GMS phones in daily use in the UK. It will be practically impossible to switch off the network for a good few years yet. Hell, cable and satellite TV has been around for a decade or more, digital broadcasts have been available for free (yes, yes, licence fee, whatever) for anyone with a compatible TV or (cheap) set-top box for years, and still we can't switch off analogue TV broadcasts yet because too many people rely on them. The situation is exactly the same for phones.

As I say, April Fool's Day is fun. But you're meant to run with one or two plausible-sounding stories, not a glut of them all so far out as to be instantly recognisable. I appreciate that slashdot is essentially a news aggregation service, but that doesn't mean that you have to aggregate all the jokes.

4/1

[nurb432]

Why are we even here.. this gets old fast.

And pink? Dear god.. hell of a color to wake up to in the morning.