3G network shutdown

[james_s]

I've been hearing about the 3G mobile phone network being retired in 2022 and that got me wondering what that means as far as potentially interesting hardware hitting the surplus market. Older network shutdowns resulted in a glut of affordable Rubidium oscillators, high quality OCXOs, GPSDOs and other bits and pieces on the surplus market. Does anyone here know what sorts of equipment are used in 3G installations?

[eti]

I've been hearing about the 3G mobile phone network being retired in 2022 and that got me wondering what that means as far as potentially interesting hardware hitting the surplus market. Older network shutdowns resulted in a glut of affordable Rubidium oscillators, high quality OCXOs, GPSDOs and other bits and pieces on the surplus market. Does anyone here know what sorts of equipment are used in 3G installations?

In which country? America is not the world.

[james_s]

In which country? America is not the world.

You answered your own question, so I might ask, why did you even ask? Were you just wanting an excuse to be a jackass? See that little flag under my name? That is there to tell you which country I'm referring to, unless I specify another. Also does it even matter? Is 3G equipment in one part of the world significantly different than 3G equipment in another part of the world?

[SiliconWizard]

There's probably a bunch of this kind of reference clock generators:
https://www.valiantcom.com/time-frequency/time-frequency.html
And of course RF amplifiers.

[Cerebus]

In which country? America is not the world.

You answered your own question, so I might ask, why did you even ask? Were you just wanting an excuse to be a jackass? See that little flag under my name? That is there to tell you which country I'm referring to, unless I specify another. Also does it even matter? Is 3G equipment in one part of the world significantly different than 3G equipment in another part of the world?

I like your logic: *assume* someone is being a wise-guy, so get in there first and be one to them (when they were not, in fact, being one) - to set an example of why others shouldn't be one. Genius. 

All you needed to say was "America" without all the snotty tone, which isn't too difficult. Americans often (VERY VERY VERY often) assume they're the pivor around which the earth rotates. Since this is a common thing, I was trying to see if you meant America, or in general.

Oh give it a rest. To me, an Englishman, your comment read as snide. You could have just said "In which countries?", adding the rest about America read as a dig whether you intended that or not.

[Cerebus]

Vodafone is in the process of shutting down 3G across the whole of Europe (including the UK) and has it planned to finish during 2022.

There's a quite comprehensive, not not particularly well organised, list of 2G and 3G sunset dates here: https://1ot.mobi/resources/blog/a-complete-overview-of-2g-3g-sunsets

[eti]

In which country? America is not the world.

You answered your own question, so I might ask, why did you even ask? Were you just wanting an excuse to be a jackass? See that little flag under my name? That is there to tell you which country I'm referring to, unless I specify another. Also does it even matter? Is 3G equipment in one part of the world significantly different than 3G equipment in another part of the world?

I am sorry if my tone seemed as if I was being a wise guy. I hadn't meant it in that sense. Sorry.

[Cerebus]

Since this is a text-based medium, and neither you nor anyone else are able to discern what my tone and intentions were, I'd advise that it would behove you to not concern yourself with what you (perceive) as "rudeness".  Your validation for my views and comments is not required.

As I have a reading age above that of a 10 year old, of course I can discern what the tone is. That is the nature of writing, the tone is what has been written. That you claim to lack the skill to deliberately express tone, or have no control of it, in your writing is your weakness, not the weakness of your readers or of the medium itself.

If you don't want to be perceived as being rude, learn to write so that you don't generate that perception by what you've written. One way of doing that is not to make gratuitous remarks based on the nationality of the person you're replying to - it unsurprisingly causes people to think that you're bigoted. Then when they get ticked off about it, don't back it up with generalisations about their countrymen sounding like some little parochial provincial Englishman who still thinks the Great in Great Britain is some kind of superlative.

You handing out advice on how to comport oneself on here is frankly laughable, since the first day you appeared on here you've rubbed everybody up the wrong way and earned yourself a reputation that is not an enviable one.

[nctnico]

I've been hearing about the 3G mobile phone network being retired in 2022 and that got me wondering what that means as far as potentially interesting hardware hitting the surplus market. Older network shutdowns resulted in a glut of affordable Rubidium oscillators, high quality OCXOs, GPSDOs and other bits and pieces on the surplus market. Does anyone here know what sorts of equipment are used in 3G installations?

My guess is that 3G equipment is far more integrated compared to the older equipment. For each new 'G' iteration the physical area one antenna services becomes smaller and thus more equipment is needed. In turn this means the equipment must become cheaper & smaller. Likely stuff like Rubidium clocks and GPSDOs are integrated onto the main board which is not useful as a standalone unit. It is also very likely that 3G equipment doesn't have a Rubidium clock + GPSDO. Just a good OCXO which gets synchronised through PTPv2. AFAIK the synchronicity needed between 3G cells is in the order of microseconds.

[Cerebus]

AFAIK the synchronicity needed between 3G cells is in the order of microseconds.

In simplistic terms ±2.5us phase (time) across the network and as tight as ±0.05ppm frequency locally (dependant on cell size, a microcell can be as poor as 0.25ppm, most cells are 0.1ppm).

[Black Phoenix]

Old post but here my experience:

Back between 2010 - 2015, I worked in a mobile telecom company in Portugal - TMN - as a Core Network Engineer.

Back at the day we had when I was admited 2 networks:

2G was being provided by Ericsson from Coimbra to the North of the Country and Motorola for the rest while 3G was NSN or Nokia Siemens Networks. The core network was all NSN.

Then like one year after the 2G network was replaced by Huawei (they won the contract because they were basically offering the hardware together with the support contract, winning all the other brands competing, as there are enough reports of similar cases around the world, and the bean counters just rejoiced) and the 2G network were all decommissioned and replaced.

Then 4G arrived and NSN were chosen, with Cisco behind as the core for the data and VoLTE implementation (at the time it was a new technology, who make in the first years, even after I left in 2015, for the data to be handled in 4G while the calls would make the phone "fallback" to 3G).

By the way the test phone at the time for such thing was a non released Nokia (Microsoft) Lumia prototype that never saw the light of the day.

At the time it was talked that with the 4G being deployed and VoLTE, 3G would die eventually, while 2G would stay as a emergency/fallback technology in case something very grave would happen.

Now from what I know the network changed again from NSN to Ericsson for the 5G and then again to Huawei while rollout was being done, but I wasn't there already and don't know the real reasons why, but since the company was sold when I was going, I would say that it was again by how Huawei does business.

I don't know if such will happen in TMN (now MEO), by leaving only 4G and 5G as dominant networks while decommissioning both 2G and 3G, but in my view it is a bad move. The mobile phone market at least in Portugal is not as in the US where people change phones as you change clothes.

Salaries are not as high, taxes are a lot, so phones are kept for a lot of years, specially if they were expensive. 2nd hand market is also strong. Plus in my view you need to have a reliable, mostly failure proof and well developed (known) technology in case "sh*t hits the fan" and all the newer techs kick the bucket, kinda like Analogue Radio is still used as a fallback for emergency announcements in case of a catastrophic event.

So seeing this by Vodafone, they really are confident on their network and customers acceptance/penetration of newer UEs (User Equipments, how a mobile terminal is called in telecom).