Slashdot Mirror
Analog Cellular Shutdown To Hit Built-In Devices
Nick Kilkenny sends us an AP article on the imminent shutdown of the US analog cellular network, now 24 years old. The network is scheduled to go dark on Feb. 18, 2008; some users, such as OnStar, are stopping analog service at the end of this year. Here's a list of devices and industries that will be affected by the shutdown. (Cellular telephony won't be affected much.) "The shutdown date has been known years in advance, but some industries appear to have a had a problem updating their technologies and informing their customers in advance... General Motors Corp., which owns OnStar, started modifying its cars after the 2002 decision by the Federal Communications Commission to let the network die, but some cars made as late as 2005 can't use digital networks for OnStar, nor can they be upgraded. For some cars made in the intervening years, GM provides digital upgrades for $15." Update: 12/22 22:25 GMT by KD : Replaced two registration-required links.
Who wants it anyway? I don't know a lot about this system, though, and maybe I'm missing something, but I see it like a spy in your car. Can someone tell me why some non-business drivers may want this stuff?
is the one saving grace of analog, but in real life tests apparently the GSM technology still outperforms analog in terms of range, so even that one may not be holding... I think that analog is coming to an end in all communications fields, it will soon be the exclusive domain of HAM radio operators again.
MP3 Search Engine
The link in "devices and industries" (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-cellularbox_webdec21,1,6636807.story?ctrack=1&cset=true) seems to want registration or summat.
Non-registration link for the Chicago Tribune article.
Crap. There goes the entertainment value of my scanner that can receive 800-900 MHz.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
The main reason I disapprove of this closure is the existence of 3 watt car phones to which there was NEVER any digital replacement. These are ideal for backwoods environments. Looks like there are boosters but still it's a bit of a hassle.
I also wonder what will happen to roadside call boxes. Were these AMPS?
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
The list of affected services is on a registration required site.
Here is a link from Associated Press that does not need registration.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
And 6 months in advance.
And each month for the last 3 months.
2 weeks before shutdown one customer, an alarm company, threatened to sue us to keep it on the air because they hadn't had enough advance warning to get their customers' installations upgraded.
Apparently they didn't believe we would actually do it.
And, yes it is worth shutting it down. The power savings alone were significant. Rack space and floor space as well.
It also freed up a lot of spectrum for re-deployment for high speed data and other stuff that I'm not allowed to talk about yet.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
So they say the old analog OnStar units cannot be upgraded to digital in certain cars. GM/OnStar should just replace the thing at their own expense for being so dumb. Corporations being dumb? Not a new concept.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
In Europe most analog networks are going off the air, the remaining networks are just NMT networks, emergency networks are all gone digital (cops and other like it). The last one is going go off in 2009, in Iceland. The NMT network in Sweden is going off the air 1 January, 2008. The NMT network in Iceland is going off the air in January 2009. The switch off is going to start in Iceland 2008.
The U.S appears to be far behind Europe in this respect. Since they still have there analog networks up and running and have problems moving to digital service.
Looks like I can kiss my Zoom Telephonics 14.4c PCMCIA cellular modem good-bye.
Not to mention my Motorola v60 TDMA phone, since the TDMA band is being switched off too.
And my dad's Uniden carphone, we're gonna have to figure out what to do about that.
GSM is a dinosaur too that is holding back progress. It should be shutdown too, but providers are too heavily invested in it.
Isn't a more pressing consequence of analog termination the effective discontinuation of rural mobile phone service? Travel into the boonies away from an interstate, particularly west of the Mississippi, and digital service rapidly disappears. The article only skirts this issue by saying that OnStar's service map still depicts the analog coverage area, which extends into more remote areas. This became quite clear to me on a trip last week to the Mojave desert and Death Valley. My friend's car decided to give up just as we reached a remote corner of Death Valley, some 75 miles away from the last town with digital cell service. I once had a Verizon digital+analog phone for these situations, but of course, retired it recently. Luckily, a ranger came by fairly soon and was able to place an analog cell call to get us towed. But now these remote areas are going to be left without service, and all we hear about is that poor OnStar users who mostly never leave the city might be inconvenienced? From now on, I guess the only options will be satellite phones at $10/minute, or CB radio, or yodelling.
GSM will never reproduce the sound stage and sheer musicality of AMPS.
To be honest, I don't miss the built-in analog phone in my 1996 7-series BMW. I mean, I guess it was kind of annoying to see an actual part of the car get trashed just due to the progression of technology, but then again, given how much warning I got, and the age of analog (really... how many people do you know who use analog phones...), I guess I just accepted it. It was inevitable, so I guess I should be more angry at BMW for not providing some sort of upgrade or modular system for the receiver.
Any companies still running on the analog system have only themselves to blame, TBH.
You can pry my Zach Morris out of my cold, dead hands.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
If the analog cell services are going off-line in Februrary, it's high time to dismantle the 800MHz band "cell-phone block" for scanning receivers. That was enacted only to create a minimal level of privacy for analog cell phone conversations. When all cell phones are using digital spread spectrum transmissions they all will benefit from spread spectrum's inherent encryption. Security is exactly what Hedy Lamarr had in mind when inventing spread spectrum.
The 800MHz block will soon be a useless relic, and should be repealed. US buyers should not be limited to buying crippled US-spec versions of receivers that are available in other countries.
Sounds like you hit on a decent business opportunity there with the airbag notification or some other crashy-feature sensor. Offer some cheap after market add on gadget that can be installed easily by any of the aftermarket soundsystem guys in their shops (no need for your own shops therefore...) plus the service(an existing pager outfit, do they still exist??), and make it cheap enough that it appeals to a lot of people.
This is in fact not a mandatory analog shutdown, but the date that cellular phone companies are ALLOWED to decomission analog. They're required to keep analog UP until this date, not shut it down at that date. The good word from AT&T is they are shutting analog down as soon as allowed. Verizon, I've heard both that they are shutting it down ASAP and that they aren't (I'm guessing it's up to each Verizon region to decide if they do or not?). I thought US Cellular had specifically said they plan to keep analog up in some areas until at least 2012. And, local providers, they may decide if it's not broke, don't fix it.
This doesn't negate the point of the article, since many places will lose analog. But, I'm guessing some of these ultra-rural desert and forest type situations, the local provider may keep analog up, at least for a while. Ultimately, though, there's no new equipment available, and indeed I've heard service parts are low too, so it'll have to go once it's unservicable.
It goes off in 2009 in the states, not 2008! Stop scaring people! Source: NAB
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Take a look at Sprint PCS coverage for Northern California. See those huge grey areas? That's "Analog Roam" territory. We're not talking about Nevada desert here, far from civilization. These are areas within fifteen miles of Silicon Valley.
So it might sound fuzzy and eat your cell battery for lunch its still better than having no signal whatsoever way out in the sticks where no self respecting cell company interested in making money would dare think about errecting a tower.
what happens to the mobitex network? that's still analog, and it's used a lot in emergency and industrial. in the us, it's handled by velocita wireless, last time i checked. the network was sold to them from att/cingular.
Sig: Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Those old, cheap little portable TV sets - the ones with a CRT and a slide-rule analog tuning dial (like a radio) were great for monitoring people's cell phone conversations. They usually analon-tuned all the way up to the old UHF channel 83 - the frequencies for the high end of the UHF - TV were long ago reallocated to cell phones.
Ultimately, though, there's no new equipment available, and indeed I've heard service parts are low too, so it'll have to go once it's unservicable.
True enough but shutting down a lot of sites means a plethora of slightly used replacement parts sitting around...
So they might be able to keep some stuff going for quite a while.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can't eavesdrop on digital cellphones with a scanner, so bored Commun^WDemocrats will have to find something else with which to occupy their time.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
You were a good phone with all of your CTEK enabled goodness. I for one miss the days of A/B channel cellular in Los Angeles. It may have taken a while to actually get a call to go through but once you were connected, the call quality was rock solid. When the call dropped it dropped, but when it was connected, it was much more clear than the digital connections we have today.
... in real life tests apparently the GSM technology still outperforms analog in terms of range, ...
Range, maybe yes. Though lower power it's also less susceptable to interference. So perhaps the range from the tower to the phone is comparable, despite the factor of 6 power difference.
But coverage? Hell no!
To convert equivalent range to equivalent coverage you have to convert all the cell sites to digital. This has NOT happened.
Analog cell sites cover virtually all of the central 48 states. GSM and other digital services are concentrated in urban areas and the most heavily-settled routes between them. (Look up the coverage maps of the various carriers to see this.)
Post telecom-crash (and the resulting reorganizations and mergers) the telecoms have concentrated on the high-density markets of the cities and the major commute routes, ignoring the rural areas and lightly cross-country routes (exactly the places where you NEED your cellphone or OnStar to work if you get into trouble).
The digital networks had only been lightly deployed before the crash. After it the telecoms apparently treated the individual cell towers as profit centers. They upgraded those where the bandwidth crunch required it or the added channels could bring in added revenue. But the lightly-used cells in rural areas - which didn't have enough traffic to pay for themselves - were not upgraded.
This completely ignores the main point of cell phones: Maintaining communication when traveling or working away from the fixed infrastructure. Yes, the lightly-used cells don't have enough traffic to pay off directly - but by filling in the holes they increase the value of the subscription to the overall network. That's how they earn their keep.
The result is that there are large chunks of the nation where cellphone service will "go dark" when/if the analog cells are shut down.
(This happens to include my country house, by the way. It's in one of AT&T's "last cell"s on the periphery of their old AMPS/TDMA network and, though they've been charging extra to try to force me into changing to GSM, as of the last time I checked - which I do every couple months - they still hadn't upgraded it. My expectation is that the service there will just die when/if they pull the plug on AMPS/TDMA.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Analog cell phones mayb the U.S should consider moving into the 21st century sometime.
~Dan
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I bought a Saab in 04 (?), GM had just added OnStar to the Saab line and was bundling the first year free. Saab's are built in Sweden, they do not have Onstar in Sweden. So they weren't really able to test it at the factory. IT WAS BUGGY AS HELL. The state I lived in had a lemon law which stated, that if a new car went into the shop 4 times for the same thing, it was by the state's definition "A Lemon". Well OnStar got my car labelled as a Lemon and GM had to buy it back. I got the next years model, went up a trim line and kept the same car payment. I think I used OnStar once. (In relation to this story) The primary reason that OnStar was flaking out, was b/c it was the first revision of units using the Digital Cell System vs Analog.
Except the region you're declaring sparse is Open Space Preserve and State Parks.
QED. At least pick a REAL logical fallacy next time.
While the FAA has managed to double the price of ELT's, and still add about half a million dollars of cost to certifying them, they have done nothing to increase the small chance of an ELT working in an aircraft mishap. Yes, I do search and rescue. No, I've never DF'ed off an ELT signal. I've DF'ed off handheld radios, yup, I've DF'ed off aircraft on the ground transmitting, but the ELT is the biggest lie in aviation.
The better and more affordable solution is an epirb. If you trigget your epirb, You'll be found within 2 hours if you're not in the middle of the pacific ocean. Support search and rescue -- get lost. But, only after you register your 406MHz beacon.
It's always struck me as odd that there isn't GSM coverage on the western side of Mount Hamilton - there are actually people living there, it's in direct line of sight from the valley (and only a couple of miles away).
Given that you can get emergency service from Iridium for about $50 USD / month, there's really no reason at all any plane that flies over rural areas should be without one. $50 per month is essentially nothing added to the monthly costs of maintaining a civil aircraft.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Hey, I live in the Nevada desert!
Analog is only cell signal you can count on in this state. I'd always try to buy a cell phone with analog mode in case I ever wanted to drive anywhere that's not Reno or Vegas, but the selection has dwindled to nothing. And on a PDA phone? Forget it. Instead, I keep an old Nokia TDMA/AMPS phone in my car just in case since it'll still dial 911 and gets better range than any current phone.
this is my sig
I miss it, kind of, nice in car, actually a long reach with a long antenna, but portables were heavy! see : NMT ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Mobile_Telephone ). But much earlier than people think, started the problems, instead going home drive to the next customer!
I was amazed that there even WAS an analog network still running in usa. and even more that someone had manufactured and sold cars utilizing one in 2005!
nmt around here had very large cells(back when it was online, more than a decade ago?), but that was afaik more due to the freq being 450mhz than to anything else.
your telcos just suck, even more than ours(for not having coverage). population density and such are no excuses really, since pretty much all of this not that tightly habitated country is gsm covered, even lapland(in places where you might need to drive 100km to buy vodka).
and well, the analog network going dark is forcing them to either convert them to digital or start losing the business.
(they're now rolling out "wireless broadband" on that 450mhz.. but with pricing/transfer limits that make the system pointless in most uses compared to umts or edge-gprs - but the cells are rather large so good for covering large areas)
-written over 3g
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
...what you're doing, what you're saying, and what you're doing in your car. =:oD