Mastodawn

🇵🇸Aug 18, 2023

@split general packet radio service, GPRS

Basically slower than EDGE but faster than regular 2G. To be honest, I think it definitely confused me when I was younger as being like 1G or something and I was using a 3G phone for a few months and I was on G at one point. I never really fall back onto GPRS or EDGE but I generally try to block 2G by messing with the phone info thing.

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and if anyone's interested, H and H+ are variants of 3G, High Speed Packet Access (HSPA)

Aug 26, 2023

@experiencer @split uhm. Agree with most of that but pretty sure you have your order mixed up. GPRS is, unless I'm very mistaken, the baseline and about as slow as it gets - with EDGE being an attempt to improve it by bundling channels together.

🇵🇸

@darkphoenix @split I think regular 2G is GSM right?

Aug 27, 2023

@experiencer @split 2G is GSM, apparently at least Wikipedia (and some of its citations) have informally dubbed GPRS as 2.5G and EDGE as 2.75G, though neither of them is a term I'd ever heard before. For further reference, GPRS allows about 40kbit/s under ideal conditions, while EDGE caps out at 384 (if you're lucky).

-> [email protected]Aug 27, 2023

@darkphoenix @experiencer @split To give more info, 2G refers to voice and SMS as the very basic cellular signals that a modern (GSM-compatible) handset can do. GPRS (ie 2.5G) is the data version of 2G GSM and therefore is the “G” that will appear on the status bar. Although I’ve never, ever, ever seen GPRS on a mobile phone in my life, the worst I’ve seen is Edge and that’s like trying to get Internet through the eye of a needle.

Aug 27, 2023

@[email protected] @experiencer @split I've seen G... less than a handful of times. EDGE is usually the lowest level it falls down to, probably at least in part because it's a fairly minor upgrade infrastructure wise. It's still almost entirely useless, unfortunately - particularly as the web gets ever more bloated and impossible to use on slow connections...

-> [email protected]Aug 27, 2023

@darkphoenix @experiencer @split On my Pixel 6 Pro, I personally hit the little toggle that turns off the 2G radio entirely because it’s better to just not have service than try to do anything meaningful with 2G signals.

Even with H/H+ I find pretty much every app and website will take an incredibly long time to load, or they will just time out. Amusingly, my Mastodon and Akkoma instances have been the only websites that will actually load over 3G.

If I could disable 3G signals and just keep the 4G + 5G radios on, that would be pretty good.

Aug 27, 2023

@[email protected] @experiencer @split I was reminded travelling Europe recently that 3G is still a thing in a number of countries... Germany has shut it off entirely a while ago, so it's either 4G/5G, or E (waaaaay more often than I'd like :S)

-> [email protected]Aug 27, 2023

@darkphoenix @experiencer @split In the UK, and the same in Europe I would imagine, is that 2G has widespread coverage and so is useful for baseline coverage even if the data rate is abysmal (ie cellular location triangulation, basic calls and SMS, and low-power devices), whereas 3G has been superseded by 4G/5G for calls, SMS, and data.

The Government has asked the networks to kill off 2G and 3G by 2033 and all of them are going to shut things down by 2024, although O2 hasn’t said anything about it yet.

🇵🇸Aug 27, 2023

@[email protected] @darkphoenix @split im enjoying my 3G

my service has been bad ever since Virgin decided to switch from EE and Vodafone to O2

I have to fall back on 3G still for calls since VoLTE was working for a while and it's gone and I've tried everything apart from a SIM swap. Either way, in some areas like my local Wilko store, it falls onto 3G even if I'm not on a call

Vodafone here hasn't turned off 3G yet though lol