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Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

> Furthermore, the study also reveals 21% of those with a 3G handset aren’t willing to upgrade, and will simply continue to use their phone without internet connectivity.

My bet would be that these are mostly devices given to children to watch Youtube and what-not.

> However, calls and texts will continue to work despite the 3G switch off, as 2G won’t be fully switched off until 2033 the latest. This is because 2G is still used for critical infrastructure, including legacy connectivity solutions that typically have a longer product life.

Is it really that much overhead to keep 2G networks operating? It's very difficult to get behind any type of cellular technology when tomorrow it could be turned off.

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Are there that many smartphones that are actually capable of running YT and have a access to a version of Android/iOS that’s still supported and are 4g only?

iPhone 5 was the first to support 4G and I’m not sure the 4s or 4 are really suitable for watching YT these days?

I think it's been fairly clear that people don't limit themselves to OS's that are still supported, and if you remove that condition from your question, I think the answer would be "yes".

> I think the answer would be "yes".

Hardly. Good luck running non-supported OS’s on iOS devices. So all of the old iphones and ipads are out.

Even on Android only a tiny statistically irrelevant proportion would both with this.

I suspect the mention of OSs that are still supported implied they weren't talking about non-supported but no longer supported OSs. So nothing exotic, just the normal OS on the device but stuck at the old version which was the final one released for it.

I have a 3G device still able to watch YT and a very old Kindle Fire that has NewPipe [1] installed for watching YT in bed (whilst my phone is on charge).

I don't see why not either - if the device was capable of H264 when it was released, why not now?

[1] https://newpipe.net/

> Is it really that much overhead to keep 2G networks operating?

Network spectrum, perhaps? Once 2G is switched off that spectrum can be repurposes for other stuff, and it's a finite resource.

It's more that it's a completely different technological paradigm. 2G is deeply based on ideas of circuit switching, not just on the radio link, but also in the core network.

It's possible to emulate all that at various levels, but that doesn't come for free (in terms of complexity, hardware, and spectrum). Maybe in 10 years it'll be cheap enough that it'll just be done in the spare cycles of some 6G or 7G SDR network, though, if that's worth the extra spectral inefficiency.

I agree with the general sentiment but 2g was launched in 1991. Turned off "tomorrow" seems like a bit of an exaggeration. 3g has also been available for 2 decades.

> [..] but 2g was launched in 1991.

For me that's the value - a low bandwidth network that is reliable and continues to be supported.

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