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A comment on Pixel 5 review: Google spends its bill-of-materials budget unwisely. Parent comment

Re:Pixel 5 review: Google spends its bill-of-materials budge... by cogman10 on Monday November 09, 2020 @06:33PM (#25041272)
Nope, carriers buy broadcasting bands. Phones are designed to be able to take in and process the various frequencies that all the carriers use.

Whenever there is a bandwidth auction, you'll have the potential of your phones not having access to your new network's bands.

How we've been handling this is that new purchases often go to newer tech. However, there has been some cannibalism of really old bands (For example, taking a 2g band and turning it into a 5g band). That happens per carrier.

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Re:Pixel 5 review: Google spends its bill-of-materials budge... by Dylan16807 on Monday November 09, 2020 @09:10PM (#25042198)
3G is already in the process of being shut down.

Which makes it a little annoying how long they kept making phones that had 4G support but still depended on 3G for calls. Still, it seems like we're on track to get those bands reclaimed at a significantly better pace than 2G.

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