Analog celluar signal to die today
source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021500036.html
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- Scott_Bromley
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Sorry Zack Morris, your giant brick of a cell phone won't work anymore after tonight. That's because the biggest U.S. mobile operators, AT&T Wireless and Verizon Wireless, will close down their analog networks forever on Monday.
The analog networks, which were first deployed in the 1980s and brought cellular service to millions of Americans, will finally disappear behind the digital networks that serve almost all mobile phones in use today.
"We're talking about a very, very small number of customers here," said AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel. He estimated that 99.9 percent of AT&T's traffic is carried on GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications). Verizon spokeswoman Debra Lewis estimated that less than 1 percent of that carrier's subscribers were on analog even before it started a big effort to reach them last year. Neither gave exact numbers of subscribers. But given that those operators have about 60 million subscribers each, the number might still be in the hundreds of thousands.
The analog networks, which were first deployed in the 1980s and brought cellular service to millions of Americans, will finally disappear behind the digital networks that serve almost all mobile phones in use today.
"We're talking about a very, very small number of customers here," said AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel. He estimated that 99.9 percent of AT&T's traffic is carried on GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications). Verizon spokeswoman Debra Lewis estimated that less than 1 percent of that carrier's subscribers were on analog even before it started a big effort to reach them last year. Neither gave exact numbers of subscribers. But given that those operators have about 60 million subscribers each, the number might still be in the hundreds of thousands.
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Tori
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With 5 daughters, my parents got on the cell phone bandwagon pretty early - we weren't allowed to drive without one in high school. My dad now uses the old brick as a doorstop for the door to his office. Awesome, right?!
- 4 years ago
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Tori
