"5G cheat pack" from Swisscom?
From Tuesday, October 1, 2019, Swisscom plans to switch on the 5G network throughout Switzerland. With a software change to thousands of 3G antennas, these are now to be usable for 5G devices. In this way, Swisscom is ignoring the will of the population and pretending to have a "super-fast mobile network", although only the slow 3G antennas are being converted.
Swisscom's 3G network works with slower 900 MHz and somewhat faster 2,100 MHz bands. This is now coming to an end. From October 1, 2019, Swisscom plans to upgrade the faster 3G bands to 5G switch. In this way, it has found a way to bypass all approval procedures when 5G is launched. In return, the existing 3G network will lose massive quality and become slower.
Well over 10,000 antennas distributed throughout the country can thus be switched to 5G without any building permit and without the population having a say. Swisscom wants to accomplish this with a software change and with small adjustments - many of which have already been made - to the existing system equipment. Under false pretenses - namely, that from now on a very fast 5G network is available nationwide - this marketing gambit suggests to the population that 5G is available throughout Switzerland as a very fast mobile network. This encourages people to buy a 5G-capable cell phone, because 5G can only be used with such a phone. This is questionable from a climate point of view, because new devices require a huge amount of non-renewable raw materials, for example.
Slow 5G, even slower 3G
With the repurposing of the 2,100 MHz frequencies for "5G-wide" - as Swisscom calls the slow 5G - customers are led to believe that they have a super-fast mobile network. Instead, these are just 3G antennas that are being repurposed. The so-called adaptive antennas, which bring 5G-fast, exist only selectively and use much higher frequencies at 3,400 MHz. Only about 2% of the antennas in Switzerland are adaptive 5G-fast installations.
New systems already unusable again?
While baited 5G users will be supplied with slow 3G antennas in the future, 3G users will lose the faster frequency range and have to switch to the slow 3G frequency. In Switzerland, tens of thousands of lift alarm systems and remote-controlled heating systems have been converted to 3G over the past few years. Some of these systems cannot switch to the lower 3G frequencies and at best switch to the dead-beat 2G, which will only be in operation until the end of 2020. So it may well be that some radio-based emergency systems will no longer work, or only to a limited extent, from October 1, 2019. Due to the switch to digital telephony, recent investments in 3G systems are already obsolete again and will have to make way for profitable new installations in many places. The economy is happy about this, but the end customer and the climate are probably not.
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