The end of 3G cellular

I had two Samsung Android phones in the past. On one the GPS never worked. Buggy software, lockups, poor battery life, lack of OS updates, and worries about security were my issues. Maybe the situation has changed now but I'm happy with my iPhones. My car doesn't have Apple Carplay. I'd like to have a periscope telephoto camera and both face and fingerprint unlock though. Maybe my next phone will be a Pixel.

 

Give your carrier a call and they will send you a code to unlock your phone.

 

Samsungs are junk, generally. That has been my experience, but I haven't owned one since they made it impossible to unlock the bootloader. I would prefer not to use Car Play/Android Auto, but Toyota forced it upon me by only installing one USB port and removing navigation. If I want to navigate I have to connect my phone to the USB, which means I can't use it for a thumb drive with music on it.

 

T-Mobile may be using the same tower as AT&T in some locations, but they are not the same network. AT&T and T-Mobile both used GSM technology, but T-Mobile and Sprint merged some time ago with Sprint which used CDMA technology. I am not sure what T Mobile is doing with Sprint CDMA network infrastructures. If T-Mobile is utilizing Sprint CDMA, then certainly that network is not being shared with AT&T. Verison is also on its own CDMA network.

In my imidate working area, AT&T has the vest signal and coverage followed by Verizon. Last I checked, about a year ago, T-Mobile GSM and Sprint CDMA coverage are so spotty I could not use in most places I frequently visit. In our region, US cellular has the best coverage, but they are not sharing the network with many other MVNOs. Google Fi and Net10 are the only MVNO I know that use US cellular networks. But I found better rates and coverage with AT&T NVNOs.

 

You might try a 2 port usb hub.

 

GSM seems to be the standard in most parts of the world. The death of 3G might be the end of CDMA. CDMA was grandfathered by Sprint before it was purchased by T Mobile. T Mobile was in the process of converting to GSM, anyway.

 

CDMA vs. GSM: What's the Difference? | PCMag

 

GSM and CMDA are both legacy 2G technologies and mostly gone. Even 3G is rare these days, as it is mostly LTE (4G) and 5G.

 

GSM will hang around for a long time in third world countries, although abandoned in many countries that are adopting 5G.

 

Will my phone still charge that way?

 

I think so, but maybe at a reduced rate. It's been a long time since I used mine so I don't remember that well. I had a thumb drive plugged into one port and the iPhone in the other. It was an unpowered hub. I think I posted on the forum some years ago about it. I'll try to find the post.

 

A much better option is to buy a quick charger from eBay that plugs into the cigarette lighter. They sell for only a few dollars, and they can deliver several amps. They also display the voltage and current. You need a heavy-gauge USB cable to experience the full benefits.

 

Cigarette lighter is already occupied. Besides I can't navigate on the car's screen unless it's plugged in to the USB.

 

Oh, right, the LE has Android Auto.

Why don't you upload the music on your microSD card in your phone?

 

Phone doesn't have microSD, but I did upload it to the internal storage. That just locks you into using Carplay/Android Auto for music. On iPhones you're not allowed to browse music through Carplay. The only way to play music is to speak the track and hope Apple recognizes it. Have you ever tried saying "play symphony no. 2 in D major, op. 36: I. Adagio molto - Allegro con brio" to your iPhone? That's assuming you've memorized all 3,000+ tracks with similarly complicated names. And heaven forbid if you have more than one performace of that same symphony by different orchestras. Whoever designed the iPhone's Carplay interface had a severe mental deficit.

 

All of them? Or just some of them?

GSM and CDMA are what my business unit was working on during the late 20th Century, until the Telecom Bust of 2001 forced many of us to go search for other opportunities. Both should be going into retirement now.

 

By late 2020s, both GSM (2G) and HSPA (3G) should disappear from most places on Earth.

https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/wp-content/uploads/NG.121-v1.0-2.pdf

 

Part of the confusion about "GSM" is that the term refers both to a particular now-obsolete 2G over-the-air protocol, and a consortium that defined a family of cellular standards, of which the "GSM" air protocol was only one. In addition to the "GSM" air protocol, the GSM consortium also defined the HSPA 3G standard and the LTE 4G standard (and now 5G). The CDMA providers followed another family of standards, which included CDMA (IS-95), CDMA2000 (IS-2000), and EV-DO (for 3G). AT&T and T-Mobile and the European providers followed the "GSM" track, and Verizon and Sprint followed the "CDMA" track. There originally was supposed to be a protocol in the "CDMA" family competitive with LTE (called UMB), but that was abandoned in favor of the GSM consortium's LTE, so everyone is now following the "GSM" consortium standards, even though the "GSM" air protocol itself is obsolete. These standards define the back end data and call handling protocols, not just the over-the-air radio protocol. In particular, the GSM protocols were specifically designed to deal with the multiple national telecom providers in Europe, to handle roaming and the predominance of pre-pay.

 

The consortium is known as 3GPP and has been in business since 1998. CDMA (2G) and CDMA-2000 (3G)—developed at Qualcomm by its three founders Irwin Jacobs, Klein Gilhousen, and Andrew Viterbi—were separate, and they have largely been abandoned, despite having network-capacity advantages early on before the 3GPP consortium began employing similar code-division modulation techniques.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP

NIHF inductee Irwin Mark Jacobs invented CDMA technology