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Analog Cell Phone Network Shuts Down Monday
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "AT&T and Verizon will be shutting down their old, analog AMPS networks next Monday, and AT&T will also turn off its old TDMA network, with smaller providers expected to follow thanks to a sunset date set by the FCC. After these old networks are shut down, the networks will be all digital. Of course, if you have one of those old fashioned 'just a phone' cellphones and it happens to be analog, you'd best enjoy the last few days before it becomes useless."
I think that there are still areas that benefit from having analog signal, especially rural area. So isn't there any benefits of keep a least one analog network alive? I'm jut curious.
Poorly maintained, bad coverage, iffy signal, rotten roaming (and occasional charges), it's ready to go.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Digital is not the end-all solution. Notice how your digital broadcasts take longer to change channels--deltas must be accumulated in the compressed stream. Notice how long your cellphone takes to connect. I like binary as much as the next geek, but I think the elegance of the bit can be slightly overrated.
Not that there would be anything interesting in those frequencies now, but it always bothered me in a way that my radio had holes in its coverage.
In a way, I find it sad that all those millions of handsets and related "back end" equipment will be going to the dump. On the surface, it would be great to have these devices land in some place that could actually use them for good - you know, as telephones for poor lonely grandmas in the 3rd world or something.
But I think I understand that if we don't want this stuff, then the people who "need a phone" likely won't be able to afford them - it's likely more economical, and therefore more efficient and less wasteful to buy and install new equipment - instead of testing and refurbishing old stuff.
But that still seems counter-intuitive to me.
So off to the nasty smelter, you old analog phone, where hopefully some good can come out of you. And hopefully, your resulting irreclaimable pollutants won't be too deadly.
will it?
-1 not first post
Honestly, 1-3 times a day there's a story approved from I Don't Believe In Imaginary Property. Thankfully, unlike Beatles Beatles Beatles, he's not using his URL to boost his search engine results but it does beg a question, how does that happen? Or are other submitters just submitting crap lately?
No reasoning behind this, just curious.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Now ham fests will be full of the discarded AMPS equipment.
I know that the FCC doesnt have a hold over Canada, but usually it seems any trend that happens in tech slowly makes its way up here, Is there any notice to Canadian consumers to expect the analog network to be going out.
I haven't owned a cell phone since I gave away my analog cell phone to a women's shelter way back when!
How will I make urgent phone calls in bathrooms in a loud voice?
How else can I convince people I'm not crazy when I'm sitting on a bus talking so loudly everyone knows what color my undies are as I describe them in detail!
What will I do in movie theaters?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I've got one of those "just a phones" that is tri-mode and I can talk where no one else can around here with their all-digital phones. I specifically asked the company to get me a tri-mode when my old one died for this reason. All my co-workers are jelious that I can talk when we're out on our routes.
Poorly maintained, bad coverage, iffy signal, rotten roaming (and occasional charges), it's ready to go.
You may have a point on most of those issues. But AMPS has FAR more coverage than the digital alternatives.
AMPS was deployed back when the phone companies thought the point of a cellular phone system was to be able to use the phone virtually anywhere. It covers nearly all of the continental US except for some very remote locations.
The digital alternatives were deployed late in the game, installed initially in large population centers and with the rural cells installed or converted largely after the telecom crash, when the tellcos were having trouble getting capital and were cutting costs wherever possible to keep their competitors from eating their lunch. The result is that cells that exist to fill in rural holes but don't generate enough calls to pay for themselves directly didn't get converted - and even some of the more suburban cells didn't get upgraded until the last few months.
If AMPS really goes dark now, much of rural America (at least the part not adjacent to an interstate highway) would have no cell service at all. That would mean that, even if you paid for a digital upgrade for your OnStar it would not work.
AT&T FINALLY converted the cell that covers my retirement home, just a couple months ago. So I just converted my cellphones to GSM. But I do a lot of traveling and vacationing in AMPS-only country - nearby that site and otherwise. In those areas the new handset is just a paperweight, while a car breakdown can be a death sentence if help can't be called. So I'm hanging on to my old AMPS-capable handset in the hope that at least some of the AMPS-only towers will stay alive.
I'm betting on the little carriers to keep theirs going and maybe even buy up some the big carriers are abandoning. But I wouldn't put it past the bean-counters at the big carriers to shut down their own low-traffic AMPS-only or AMPS-TDMA cells rather than spending the bux to convert them. (IMHO if they were really interested in keeping the coverage up they'd have ALREADY converted them (rather than just running ads about what great coverage they have), and their coverage maps show they haven't.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Finally Americans will be able to get away from brick-sized analogue mobiles with a talk time of 20 minutes.
In all seriousness, has any mobile manufacturer made an analogue phone in the last ten years?
About time... Rogers up in Canada shut down it's TDMA network about half a year ago.
I remember the old GRE PRO-2006's from Radio Shack. All you had to do was clip a diode to enable those forbidden frequencies. Many a night I sat up after the bars closed (2AM here in Tallahassee) and swept 871-896 MHz. You never knew what you would come across. People screwing around on their spouses, lawmakers swapping votes for sex or ordering hookers, or the owner of a popular bar with a very recognizable voice due to his radio ads buying coke. Those were the days!
Those 1-3 submissions come from 5-6 submissions per day as you can see in the Firehose. Sometimes, you'll have some I submitted yesterday mixed with those submitted today as you can see right now. I submitted the earlier story about printers yesterday, but this one was submitted this afternoon. Again, you can see all this on the Firehose, which date stamps them when I submit them.
.DOC) files, naming unnamed 'researchers' who discover things, giving you the original story where possible (rather than some sites re-re-re-report of whatever), linking to Wordpress and similar blogs via Coral Cache (and seeding the cache by visiting the site BEFORE I send it to Slashdot). Not to mention whichever other random ideas that come up periodically when someone writes a (+5, Insightful) saying "Why the HELL didn't you do X???" I've had to rewrite more than one headline to fit in the length limits without a damn ? at the end, bite my tongue to avoid hilarious and snarky quips I would like to add as the last line, and find those damn typos that manage to sneak past me even though I spell check my submissions.
Although someone replied to you that I was Zonk's sock puppet, I have no link to any of the Slashdot editors as far as I know. Heck, I'm not even in the top 10 submitters or all that close. As you can see, there are many who have even less of a life than I do (or something) and have hundreds of submissions. New York County Lawyer keeps flirting with the #10 spot, and I think you guys know how much he posts.
As for my motive, well, it's mostly just for fun while I slack off from my work as a sysadmin for a place that makes windows (the glass kind, not the Microsoft kind). Sure, I have an agenda to push, but I'm just some guy who fits entirely too many Slashdot stereotypes, which is why I link to the EFF donate page, or to that "I Wouldn't Steal" page the EU folks made. I should probably link to the US Pirate Party more often, too.
I use an unregistered account for a number of reasons. One is that I'm doing this from work. Another is that anyone who believes as I do is free to share the ID and post stories to Slashdot.
Unlike the others who dump as many submissions as they can, I try to cull what I think are the best stories of the day. I frequently ignore stories that later appear on Slashdot anyhow. An example from today would be how the UK ISPs put out a statement that they're against policing users. The statements are new, but the story isn't. I just covered it yesterday, so I felt it was too much of a rehash and ignored it. When I think there's something new, I try to link to the previous stories and give better coverage.
Also, you may have noticed that I try to be diligent in marking PDF (and
So, that's it in a nutshell. If you don't like me, I'm sorry, but there's not much I can do about that, though I'm open to reasonable suggestions. I have no idea when I'll get too bored or busy to continue. I have no idea if people will ever take up posting in "my" name. But that's who and what I am and I'm always trying to find ways to make better submissions.
In other words, except for the attention-grabbing name, I'm a pretty typical Slashdotter.
- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
Has nobody mentioned all the legacy devices that will go dark as part of this? It's not just the brick phones, but the first-gen OnStar (etc) systems, cellular backups for burler and fire alarms, even some remote telemetry systems and/or SCADA systems.
Of course, I said "cya" to my old bag-phone 15 years ago just like everybody else, but there's probably lots of these systems that will need to be replaced.
A friend of mine kept analog service for a few years after everybody else had switched to digital. He liked driving around the hills, where coverage was still spotty, and while digital is better when the signal's good, if the signal's bad, analog is noisy but digital won't connect at all. It's not a universal problem, but it worked for him. These days he's got some little digital set with data functions and a camera, of course...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Just like cassette tapes, analog phones are long overdue for a proper burial. It also opens up a nice bit of the spectrum for other uses, which is always a good thing. AND, it makes phones a little bit less expensive as they no longer are required to have an analog fall-back mode(which rarely if ever worked anyways).
phone/bludgeon.
Usually, I do this for a bit in the morning, before I have anything to do. Wired & Ars are both good sources, so yeah, I do use them a lot (maybe too much; I now try to trace the story back further unless their coverage really adds something).
:-) I think that this is why the editors take the submissions they do: as you can see from the Firehose, there really ISN'T that much in there that's good, and I spend time trying to make my submissions worthwhile, though it isn't always perfect.
:-)
But most of my submissions take about a day to get accepted. Probably because there's no real news at times, so they take the best of the 'leftovers' they have saved up. If anything, there's a slight bias against my submissions, I'd say. The editors seem to prefer the more unique stories. Once or twice, I've even lost attribution and been bumped down to 'an anonymous submitter', but it's no big deal. Heck, once I even asked them to do it for that story if they felt it would detract from the news, but they didn't publish that story at all.
On the whole, I'd say that they usually post the best submission they have at the time. Sometimes, they do make that decision a little early for the 'big' news, though, and you'll see plenty of better submissions in the Firehose that probably weren't there when they scheduled it to run in a few hours. They usually prefer to add an update to the bottom of the story in that case, per my observation.
In the mean time, though, all this submitting has given me an appreciation for how hard it is to find decent news. Sometimes, there's nothing out there that's worth reporting and I don't submit very much, if anything, on those days. But there's almost always at least one or two stories, though they're just not exciting ones. I keep trying to expand the number of sites I check, but there are only so many that have anything worth reporting on.
I tried submitting some other things like the latest malware trends, but Slashdot only rarely posts things about new virus trends or the latest patches and exploits, so I mostly don't bother. Articles on space get accepted pretty often, but there aren't that many big or interesting discoveries, though we've had a few good ones lately (like that 'spider' crater). I probably do best in law, though, because I've learned a number of legal terms via Groklaw and I try to explain them properly in my submission. But big stories from Groklaw are submitted fast, so I'm usually too late to get them these days. Rob Weir's blog has good insight on OOXML most of the time, but honestly, not all of the posts are that newsworthy.
In other words, appreciate it. It's damn hard to find good stories, especially considering that I'm working for free here. I mean, if it wasn't for the crazy name I used, no one would notice
Oh, and BTW, I *do* have a real account. It's not Zonk or any other editor. It's old, but not a very low UID at all, though I do sometimes get mod points. I have a bunch of friends, several freaks and foes as well as excellent karma and approximately a dozen accepted submissions. So that explains why I 'just appeared' out of nowhere submitting lots of stories: I already knew what I was doing when I took up the cause, I just hadn't bothered to dig up so many beforehand. I almost wish that I used it from work at times. Being behind a censor/proxy that even intercepts SSL connections with a bogus cert, the timeout on posting comments anonymously is REALLY annoying at times, so I have to choose them carefully. And sometimes I spend parts of the hour or more I might have to wait revising what I was going to say.
Anyhow, I'm more surprised no one has noticed that other guy, the user 'pickens' who submits as "Ponca City, We Love You" all the time. It's him that I wonder about
... the midget who operates the switch will be out of a job.
To everyone wondering about their favorite AMPS-only areas, I highly doubt those towers will be deactivated.
The whole purpose of this deactivation is so that the cell phone companies can make MORE money, not less! One person using AMPS in a metropolitan area ties up several digital lines. But until monday, none of those AMPS towers could be turned off (per this FCC mandate)!
Thus, I suspect that the only AMPS towers going offline come Monday are those that were costing them money (the ones in areas that already have digital coverage). Shutting down towers in AMPS-only areas cuts off paying customers, and erodes a nearly ubiquitous and cost-effective last-mile coverage tool.
As a result, those who live in the City -> roam in a Rural area won't be affected (as long as you have a phone with both radios). The ones who will be affected MOST are those who live in Rural -> roam to the City. If their rural AMPS phones don't support both AMPS & the current digital standards, they will not get any reception in that city area.
Disclaimer: IANACPCS (I Am Not A Cell Phone Company Spokesperson)
AT&T was so determined to get me off their old network, they finally made me an offer for a plan that was half the price of their cheapest new plan - including a 2-year contract and a free phone. Then, yesterday, I upgraded one of my kids from "pay as you go," to a copy of my dirt-cheap digital plan. They didn't want to do it, but finally agreed. So you see -- analog can be cheaper !
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
AT&T and Verizon, huh? They probably just want to phase out analog because it is easier to store digital phone calls to sell to the government.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
I always suspected that AMPS/TDMA were being phased out for phone service due to the inability of the operators to impement E911 location servcices on it.
You would think that the FCC would allow the cellular companies to hold a few channels open for analog. Even if they don't support E911, an emergency call where the caller has to give an address is still better than no call at all. But, if they leave the channels open, they could become quite valuable to a certain set of users that don't want their position to be tracked.
Have gnu, will travel.
The network is being shut down because the carriers begged the FCC to allow them to do it. Not because the FCC made them do it.
That rickety-ass analog shutting down entire days of the week now. wtf.
In the mid-90s, my parents picked up a cheap analog Motorolla. It sounded so good, no one could tell that it was a cell phone. When I used a StarTac in places with analog-only coverage, I also would get much better sound quality. I've never heard a digital phone come close to its quality.
No, I will not work for your startup
That's one of the intentional features of the name, actually. I don't think much of anyone has taken me up on the offer, though :-)
Okay, there is that one guy down there who posted the link to the Bash.org joke where the guy leaves his IRC session unattended saying to ignore anything typed into it for a while because it'll be his brother. After which, his brother types "HAHA DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCK!"
But I don't think that counts...
... and thanks for all the fish! Perhaps now we can use the freed bandwidth for more usefull things such as a free public WiFi.
Up till 3 months ago, every phone I owned was Tri-Mode (AMPS, 800 CDMA, 1900 CDMA). It used digital service in town, but in very rural areas, and when you go camping, you are far more likely to pick up an analog signal than anything else. So I made sure to get a tri-mode phone to carry with me for emergencies. I finally switched to GSM when I got tired of paying $45 for Verizon service when I only use about 100 minutes a month. At that point I knew they were going to be shutting down the analog service within the year anyway, so there wasn't much reason for me to stay.
So now that AMPS is shutting down does this mean that slashdot will have to upgrade its cellphone icon to GSM? I mean it's nice to have a device that can double as a weapon, but you'll still have your Model M.
Digital handles poor signal better.
;)
When I lived in CT I had a triband Motorola; at home I had a full six bars of analog coverage and it was amazing, the best quality of any phone I've ever used, corded, cordless, wireless, you name it.
But when I drove out to the styx and dropped to one or two bars of analog, oh lordy. It was TERRIBLE - constant static, deafening "power station" noises blasting at random, buzzing clicking popping whistling screeching, you name it. My current phone and location I have 0-1 bar depending on the weather and lunar alignment, it does drop every so often, and sometimes gets a little choppy, but other than that it's more than usable.
Like Mae West, when analog is good it's very good...and unlike her, when it's bad it's very bad
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
The point will be made when they throw the sender in GTMO for mailing a "suspicious electronic device" to the White House.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
There are a lot of places where I currently only get an analog signal. Does this mean that mean that I just won't be able to use my cell phone at all in these areas? I'm not talking rural areas, there are several major metropolitan areas where all I get is analog. I use Alltel, but I think I've been using someone else's network in these places.
At its funeral, I need to finally chime in.
I was in the cell phone industry in the U.S. in the late 1980s. The systems were analog, and most phones were installed in vehicles and were relatively expensive. The cheapest phones were several hundred dollars and went up to a few grand for the smallest handheld phones. I also recall that roaming rates were as high as $.90 per minute in certain cities. For obvious economic reasons, most people did not have cellular phones.
At the beginning of the TDMA era, I was asked to beta-test the new-fangled digital phones by giving them away to our best customers. My staff installed many of them for our customers...who would turn down such a gift when even the brochure purported 'CD quality'? It wasn't long though before the angry calls came in: hands down, they hated them; most demanding that I reinstall their old equipment. 'It sounds like I'm in a tunnel; it's very echoy.' 'The call quality isn't clear.' 'It sounds like the caller has hung up on me.' Sound familiar? Well I told the customers what my boss told me to say 'they're testing them now, upgrades will come and tuning will occur'.
Time passed... Today, I don't see that digital phones have gotten any better, even 20 years later. For starters, the switch to digital was, in part (if not mostly), to fit more people on the same # of frequency channels. For initial TDMA, three digital calls could be crammed onto one analog voice channel (we even watched it as it occurred on our monitoring spectrum analyzers). That extra capacitiy means more money for the cellular carrier, of course. Now the downside, as you bandwidth banditos already know, is that there has to be a tradeoff; and I'm telling you that the tradeoff was in voice/call quality. The quarter-second processing delay during conversations make you feel like you're talking to a news correspondent in the Mideast. And the sampling rate is so poor, that voices are mere metallic shadows of their original composition. Ever try to listen to someone playing music for you over a cell phone? If not, try it, you'll see what I'm talking about.
So why am I bringing all of this up now? It dawned on me once as to why people just accept such crappy call quality today: they don't know any better. If people bought their first cell phone 15 years ago or more recently, then they probably did not use an analog phone for years so as to compare it to its digital counterparts. Further, if someone HAD an analog phone 20 years ago, a comparison of today's cellular tower coverage/build-out to that of decades ago is also inaccurate, be the phone analog or digital. Heck, I wouldn't know any better either if I hadn't "been there" during the transitional phase, with access to all kinds of these (expensive) phones, etc.
I guess that's why I bring this up now, the ignorance of this is about to be made permanent, with the carriers cashing in all the while. My mom just gave up her bag(!) phone which I got for her decades ago. On its last active day its calls were still indistinguishable from landline calls. Maybe once in a while there would be some static, but the calls would continue through it. It's a shame that the analog systems will not.
As I am still connected the cellular industry, I must post anonymously.
...about "crappy" analog, but my cell service under analog was much clearer than it ever was under digital. Nasty compression artifacts, warbled sound and crappy coverage are the norm now. When I had analog (many moons ago) most people couldn't even tell I was on a cell phone.
This also means that some traffic lights will lose connectivity.
The CPDP data protocol, used by many embedded system modems like those in traffic control will also be shut down since it is part of the AMPS network.
Good thing it's Presidents' Day on Monday!
Kriston
Fast and hard!
I regret that I only have one mod point to give per post.
At work, we have an AMPS telemetry device on our backup power generator. When it turns on, it uses the AMPS connection to notify everyone via an email. Security systems often work the same way.
It's low bandwidth and cheap and it works.
But not after Monday.
Most of the AMPS network was shutdown in Australia at the end of 1999, with the exception of a few rural areas where GSM coverage wasn't equivalent, and since time as Telstra created a CDMA network, the Australian government funded some of the CDMA towers to cover these areas.
Now we are going the same again in rural areas where Telstra has announced they are shutting down the CDMA network and get everybody on to their HSDPA network (otherwise known as next g), but coverage isn't as good yet, and for once we have the governement actually looking after users side and said Telstra has to keep the CDMA networking running for now
Although it has been impossible to get valid ESNs for the thing since the late 1990s, I'm going to miss my Oki and the old days of A/B channel analog. It isn't nearly as efficient as digital in terms of users per cell site, but I swear the voice quality was a whole lot better once you actually got a connection.... even if it took 15+ seconds to hear the first ring as the sites handed you off to BFE because all of the closest sites were already overloaded.
so..exactly what does this mean for all of those emergency 911 handsets that have been given out to beaten spouses, people worried about their safety, grandmas driving around with an old handset, etc? all of those people are left in the dark, and worse, with a false sense of security that their handset will still contact emergency services.
Sig: Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Now all you need to be after all that is a poster who researches the material completely before posting replies. Gives plenty of background material and never uses a fallacy. And above all tries to not follow the herd. Then clone yourself because that's the only way slashdot will reverse the downward spiral it's been in since Taco sold the site.
"When I had analog (many moons ago) most people couldn't even tell I was on a cell phone."
Except when you yelled "I'm gonna crash!!".
oh right. But you still have to be Asian or Arabic to qualify for guantanamo, right?
-1 not first post
What about the thousands of people--often abused women in dangerous situations--who have been given donated cell phones through numerous charitable organizations so that they can dial 911 in an emergency?
Have they been warned about the upcoming transition? Are the cell phone companies going to give them new digital phones?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I'm not so sure about that--I think Democrats qualify, too.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
For a lot less money, you can invest in a piece of technology I just bought for snowmobiling, called a "SPOT", it's a pager sized device that sends ok, I need help, and 911 type messages to whomever you designate (except for the 911 message, that's handled by the company behind SPOT).
SPOT uses the globalstar satellite network and has a built in GPS receiver, so it sends coordinates with every message, even the OK messages you can send to your friends and family.
http://www.findmespot.com/
I'd say this is perfect for RV'ers or anyone else that is worried about that emergency breakdown or worse, the MI or significant trauma out in the middle of nowhere.
Best part, the whole thing is browser configurable.
I don't work for SPOT, I don't sell SPOT, I just have one and feel safer. I think it could allay the fears of many people living in the sticks using analog cellular (until Tuesday) as it is a way to communicate with your loved ones and to request help that isn't tethered to ANYBODY's analog or digital network.
Ocean is land, covered with water.
I agree with all of your statements, the point I'd like to bring up is that given the ridiculous poliferation of cellphone ownership and usage (to the point of elimination of land lines) it seems that somewhere, something would have to give and it definitely is in voice quality/sample rate/etc. due to how many calls are packed into the same (relative) amount of bandwidth we had for analog calls 20 years ago. I still get busy signals where I live, mostly when our area is inundated by vacationers using up all our cellular capacity, and forget about trying to use EDGE after the ski area closes for the afternoon, all the road warriors that are "on vacation" are busting ass in their hotel rooms working...
I remember my bag phone, I thought it was pretty sweet, simply because it worked, but boy I was happy to switch to a Motorola flip phone, it was at least 2" thick and had battery life that was measured in minutes...but it was an improvement over the bag phone at least for weight purposes.
Jeff
Ocean is land, covered with water.
You're welcome.
:-)
It's hard, though. No matter how hard you try, it's so easy to miss something and then there are long threads about how on earth you could possibly have missed X and the story is totally wrong. The worst, though, is that sometimes it *isn't* wrong, the person has just misread something...
But that's pretty much Slashdot. You can't believe everything that's modded +5
Effectively, I'm losing coverage. The article says Verizon has been warning customers, but this is the first I've heard of this. Sure, my phone does digital, but never from home. Only the analog network reaches me here. And I don't live in a rural area. I'm in the hills just east of San Francisco Bay. Coverage here sucks.