Digital Solecism

Come Monday, Feburary 18thm 2008, most analog cell phone signals in the country will go the way of the dodo.

(Photo Courtesy of Ecojoe.com)

According to a story on inforworld.com, Verizon and AT&T will both shut down their analog networks that day, with the other major networks soon to follow. The carriers aren’t too worried about losing customers, however:

“We’re talking about a very, very small number of customers here,” said AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel. He estimated that 99.9 percent of AT&T’s traffic is carried on GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications). Verizon spokeswoman Debra Lewis estimated that less than 1 percent of that carrier’s subscribers were on analog even before it started a big effort to reach them last year. Neither gave exact numbers of subscribers. But given that those operators have about 60 million subscribers each, the number might still be in the hundreds of thousands.

- infoworld.com

Obviously as they said this won’t affect many people, although some smaller companies are still struggling to fully convert to digital. OnStar already cut off their analog customers (The in dash OnStar devices used Analog cell phone signals). But a bigger problem exists for some alarm companies, who still rely on analog signals to relay information to the company.

This isn’t a new thing though.. so if they’re still struggling at this point to find other answers, no one is to blame but them.

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