Technology

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.

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.

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 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.

Recovery from brain injury?

/sorry

I live outside of a big city in the UK. Many times I can ONLY get 2G.

the 5g standard includes many frequencies, including long range 2g-like ~400Mhz ones

Why couldn't you turn off 3G on that old phone via that same hidden menu? Or how come the phone didn't even recognize that it can fall back to 2G...

There's a lot of hidden cost associated with supporting legacy features/standards/technology

Do they have different frequencies? Require different antennas?

Are there cost implications for radios / amplifiers? Do ASICs support only newer modes? How much obsoleted / legacy HW is required?

And that's just from a manufacturer standpoint.

Are more licenses required? Or other regulatory impacts?

lower range. oh you said benefits?

5g is a lot more capable and flexible compared to older generations. The main one is a massive increase in capacity, for the same frequency allocations. Compounding with this is that it can be directional. This allows several phones to use the exact same channel simultaneously, so long as they are positioned at different angles to the tower.

5g also uses more frequency bands, allowing even more data to be moved around. Unfortunately, 2g has most of the lower frequencies, higher frequencies carry more data, but have less penetration into buildings.

Finally, 5g allows for priority and context awareness. E.g. the police can have their phones prioritised, or VoIP calls given priority over video streaming. It can also trade bandwidth for range. This allows a tower to either reach further to cover a larger area, or focus down, to provide more bandwidth locally.

In theory 5g could have a similar range to 2g. However, that rarely happens. It requires it using the lower frequencies, that 2g currently uses, and well as dropping its data rate to improve range. Most of the time it's optimised for shorter range, and more towers using higher frequencies. This gives impression of a far smaller range. But give a huge increase is available bandwidth.

[Not Serious] 3 numbers more.

The “g” stands for generation. So it’s the 5th iteration of the technology versus the 2nd iteration. Whilst there are many improvements (speed, capacity, security etc) there are some negatives. (I believe mainly to do with signal penetration - i.e. getting a signal in basements, stone wall houses, being behind objects etc.)

Where I’m currently staying I have: 2G, edge, 4G and 5G signals available.

5g > 2g if g is positive

Obviously Internet speed and call quality, plus there are many good technical changes under the hood, such as proper isolation of calls etc.

Both, really. There's been encoding improvements every generation, but they also use different slices of the spectrum.

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 of those, and also different signal modulation.