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Comment by speedcoder | Hacker News Reader

Is there any way to fix my old 3G phone to continue to work under 5G?

Depending on your operator/locality, and whether you're okay with being limited to voice and barely a 100 kbit/s of data, it might "just work", no need to do anything special. Your 3G phone will happily fall back to 2G/2.75G (a.k.a. GSM/GPRS/EDGE), where such network is available.

For example, in the Netherlands, KPN, the last operator to switch off 3G, is planning to do so at the end of this month.

2G, on the other hand, is still in the air, with commitments to keep it alive until 2025, possibly longer.

Source (in Dutch): https://www.kpn.com/zakelijk/blog/de-toekomst-van-iot-vraagt...

unlikely as long as you can't switch out the modem and antenna.

So you would need:

- a new antenna

- a new modem

- a driver working with your CPU/OS, which is likely to not be the case

- a way to replace the parts

Sometimes the modem is part of the CPU package, making it impossible.

Driver limitations make it often even impossible to produce "the same phone but with just another modem", not even speaking about upgrading.

The best chance to update to 5G is in laptops where the modem is on a separate Bord, but even then you have the problem of firmware lock-down and interface incompatibilities.

A single board computer could get you close to these requirements, as long as there are USB dongles for everything [0]. That takes care of 1, 2, and 4. As for drivers, I'm not sure if you can pipe voice calls across these (VOIP, yes, but cellular calls? I have no clue how that works).

[0] https://www.amazon.com/4g-usb-modem/s?k=4g+usb+modem

with SIP ATA you can probably get it to work with enough work. I don't know whether any actually support enough of TS 24.229 to actually work with a VoLTE network.

Is there any way to fix my old 3G phone to continue to work under 5G?

If you only use it around the house, you can get a picocell.

I once lived in a building that was too tall for cell service to reach the upper floor residences, and the carriers (mine was AT&T) would send the residents picocells to relay the signals from their cell phones to the internet.

The WiFi will still work for a long time to come. That's the best you can do. There are plenty of apps to call through WiFi. I use Skype for most of my calling. I only use the cell network when I'm outside the home.

I wish.

My iPhone is affected by this (or so Sprint tells me) and I'm holding off as long as I can. I'm seriously considering one of these: https://www.sprint.com/en/shop/cell-phones/sonim-xp3-plus-no...

I won't buy an Android because I don't trust Google, and I'm just tired of Apple's poor quality lately.

The last iPhone without 4G was iPhone 4s released in 2011. If you have newer, but still very old phone it may not support T-Mobile bands.

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