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Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off
(www.theregister.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Those bands have great uses too imo, further range than 5g, great for beacons, telemetry, low bandwidth send and recieve. Could be really useful and the only upside of discontinuatuon is maybe they'll let me and the other amateur radio operators play around on segments of those bands eventually. All the stuff you kick off the 2/3g networks will need to be updated and start clogging the 5g bands. Needless traffic on frequencies that could be reserved for denser traffic. Im sure profits will rise slightly for maybe a year or two though, so clearly a worthwhile decision.
They aren't going to disallow the usage. They are just going to stop using the old hardware and deploy new generations of hardware on that frequency
There aren’t “5g bands”. The reason they shut down 2g/3g is to reuse the spectrum for 5g.