Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by stephen_g 57 days ago
That's incredible, here in Australia they not only shut down all 2G networks almost a decade ago, but they've already shut down 3G as well!

Although now looking at Wikipedia there are a lot more 2G networks sticking around than I realised, still hard for me to believe given what's happened here!

1 comments

You do realize it’s a fake 2g/3g network and most phones don’t care. They will happily connect to whatever they support.
Only if they’re not already connected to a better network, no?
Funny enough its the tower that tells the cellphone modem which network is "better" and it does this in an unencrypted cell reselection message. So it is easy to force a phone to select 2G.

https://efforg.github.io/rayhunter/heuristics.html#lte-sib67...

Huh, I was going to say that this can't possibly be the case for the newer standards, but it seems like it really is the case even in 4G/LTE...

Hopefully devices at least ignore it when 2G is deactivated entirely, for those where that's possible.

Of course I realise that, but that’s irrelevant to my point.

The point was that I’m surprised how many real 2G networks there still are, and that one still exists in Canada at all.