{"id":658,"date":"2008-02-18T19:26:01","date_gmt":"2008-02-19T00:26:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scaredpoet.com\/wordpress\/?p=658"},"modified":"2008-02-18T19:34:55","modified_gmt":"2008-02-19T00:34:55","slug":"the-death-of-cellular-dinosaurs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/?p=658","title":{"rendered":"The Death of Cellular Dinosaurs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cell<\/p>\n

Amazingly, today is finally the day that US cell carriers are no longer required to offer traditional analog cell phone service<\/a>. You remember analog service, right? Back in the day, there was no such thing as surfing the web on a cell phone. Nor was there text messaging. You could just make calls… for about 30 minutes before the battery required a recharge, that is. How boring is that?<\/p>\n

Anyway, analog service became the albatross of big carriers like Verizon and AT&T, whose parts have been around in some form or another long enough to have offered analog phones and services at one time. The FCC had mandated that if at some point you offered the old analog service, then you HAD to keep it running. Until today. <\/p>\n

It should be pointed out that the FCC is not ORDERING that analog service be shut off. Rather, today was the “sunset date” on an old FCC requirement that cell carriers who once offered analog service continue to offer it. The FCC is simply dropping the requirement to keep analog service running, and carriers can leave it on or turn it off as they see fit. Still carriers like AT&T and Verizon, who are consistently hungry for any scrap of bandwidth they can get, are surely going to take advantage of this and shut analog down.<\/p>\n

T-Mobile customers should be completely unaffected by the change, considering there was never any analog service to be had on that network. The same mostly goes for Sprint customers, though Sprinters who are used to roaming on analog networks might see some of that roaming coverage suddenly disappear. <\/p>\n

For the most part, those who will be affected most by this are the technological stalwarts who still have old style bag phones or brick phones, and have refused to upgrade. Though, AT&T’s old TDMA customers may also see their phones go dark soon too, as they use similar switching gear. AT&T has been making the announcement about the shutoff for quite some time now<\/a>, encouraging people to upgrade to a modern phone. They’d even charged customers of the old cell tech a $9.99 month-extra fee for the privilege of using those old clunky phones. Clearly AT&T wants out of the analog business!<\/p>\n

Some enthusiasts have set up a death watch<\/a> using their old cell phone gear<\/a>, but have discovered as of this writing the end has not come so swiftly just yet, and people can still get an analog\/TDMA signal. We’ll see how long that lasts!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amazingly, today is finally the day that US cell carriers are no longer required to offer traditional analog cell phone service. You remember analog service, right? Back in the day, there was no such thing as surfing the web on a cell phone. Nor was there text messaging. You could just make calls… for about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}