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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.
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.
Poorly maintained, bad coverage, iffy signal, rotten roaming (and occasional charges)
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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!
3rd world Grandmas are probably using digital networks. The odd thing is that a lot of 3rd world countries that didn't have phone service at all got digital wireless phone service because it's relatively cheap to build out, while the US (for example) was slower to adopt wireless service because we had landlines.
But analog phones - ugh. I remember the three hours of standby battery life, and 30 minutes of talk time, or having a phone the size of a brick. My first two cell phones were dual-mode or tri-mode; they'd work on analog networks as well as digital, and I remember that if it had to use the analog network, the battery life would drop from a day or two to hours.
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.)
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Until Tuesday.
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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.
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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
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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.
AFAIK, Rogers already got rid of their AMPS system early last year and both Bell and Telus are planning on following the FCC's lead. Here in saskatchewan, i dunno what sasktel is planning, though i'm pretty sure they already have CDMA2000 1X everywhere they have analog service (and in some places they don't), so i wouldn't be real suprised if they followed everyone else and axed the analog in the near future.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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.
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
No, they intended to replace TDMA as soon as GSM came along. TDMA was evolutionary step towards GSM. W-CDMA is based on GSM under the covers, too.
It's all about how many users they can fit into the channels they are licensed.
CDMA is the undisputed ruler of bandwidth but call audio quality suffers in congested cells, though at least CDMA users are almost guaranteed the ability to complete a call even if you cannot hear the called party clearly.
GSM is always good quality at the expense of the bandwidth used per user.
GSM errs on the side of user call quality.
CDMA errs on the side of user call completion rate.
TDMA offers none of this (neither does AMPS for that matter).
Kriston
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.
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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?
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