Well, a lot of those have used AT&T’s network to do that and have used 3G on AT&T’s network. And they track your dog, right? So in case you lose your dog, and you have this collar on him, then you can pinpoint them using GPS. I have actually written columns about them before. Stern: (laughs) So some companies have made these smart dog collars. If you’ve had a smart dog collar, I don’t know if you have one of those?
After I published this column, I heard from so many readers saying, “Why didn’t you mention my Audi or my Volvo, or my Honda? Because I’ve gotten notifications from those companies saying that 3G is going to be shut off, and so I need to either go in for an upgrade, or I won’t have services in my car that connect to 3G.”Īdams: What other tech that you might not expect is affected by the end of 3G? Some other things that have been affected are things you might not actually think of, one is actually connected cars. But there are some people, so if you do have a phone, the carriers have been telling people via text message and email and snail mail that you need a new phone to basically do any sort of communication. AT&T specifically says only 1% of its customers have devices that depend on 3G. Stern: Well, the carriers say that right now, people with phones that depend on 3G is pretty slim to none. 3G made that shift for us where we would feel more comfortable clicking on links in an email or clicking on links in a web browser, because we didn’t fear that this was going to take another 50 seconds to three minutes.Īdams: So who in particular is going to be affected by the end of 3G? And now we hit “Enter” and that web page is just there, in an instant. In my column, I said it was sort of like being in the midday DMV line, where you just inch, inch, and you’re like, “I’m never going to get there.” This webpage is never going to fully load. I mean, some of us remember just having these older phones - not the touchscreen kind - but with these keyboards, and we’d watch the web browser sort of just inch along. How do you explain to people sort of what that moment was like? Kimberly Adams: I think it might be hard for folks who are a bit younger to recognize how big of a shift that was, because I remember being able to suddenly start looking at videos on your phone in a meaningful way. It also had a big impact on location services and GPS, and so we got things like Uber and Seamless and things that could just instantly know where we were going and where we wanted to go. And those faster speeds unlocked lots of apps, that network had a huge impact on getting us things faster.
And that’s because we finally got broadband-like connectivity on our phones. Joanna Stern: 3G was a huge milestone, and it really marked the smartphone revolution. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, wrote about the coming shutdown, and what a turning point 3G was for smartphone use. Commercial 3G networks first started popping up in the early 2000s and were about thirty times faster than their 2G predecessors.
22, T-Mobile by July 1, and Verizon by the end of the year. In order to make room for that expansion, carriers are shutting down their 3G networks.ĪT&T plans to discontinue its 3G network by Feb. Your browsing speeds may have sped up significantly as mobile carriers rolled out more of their 5G service this week with some delays around certain airports.