For the purpose of this community, a retro cellular phone is one that requires a 1G, 2G or 3G network, as opposed to 4G or newer. Why would someone wish to use such a phone? Different people may have different reasons:

  • Some people don’t want any kind of smartphone: we want to use a plain mobile phone that makes and receives phone calls, and nothing more. We don’t want a device that has a smartphone architecture inside, we want a traditional dumbphone from 1990s or early 2000s. Modern “dumbphones” are cheap imitations, while we want the real deal.
  • Some people may be very loyal to specific brands or models of old phones. A person may have their favorite Ericsson or Nokia or Motorola phones, or any other brand of olde, and (we say) has a natural right to keep using them forever.
  • Another type of person may be less partial to specific brands or models of old phones, but much more partial to the underlying cellular technology - for example, GSM. A retro-telecom engineer may have given years or even decades of his or her life to GSM (or D-AMPS TDMA or CDMA or iDEN) technology, and has a natural right (in our view) to live out the rest of his or her life enjoying said technology.

Different motivations, common interest

While different members of this community may have totally different personal reasons and motivations, we have one goal and interest in common: we want to keep our beloved phones working. Keeping retro mobile phones working means not only maintenance and repair on the phones themselves (including batteries), but also maintaining cellular network services for these phones to be functional, and providing our own replacements when traditional commercial carriers fail in their duty to do so.

Scope of this community

In the olden eras of interest to us, prior to today’s LTE monoculture, different countries had different 1G, 2G and 3G cellular standards. The founder of this community (and author of this post) is based in USA (grew up here since age 15.5), hence my own knowledge and expertise is mostly Amero-centric. However, my own interest centers mostly around GSM technology, a form of 2G, and this particular technology originates from Europe, with North American version (with different frequencies, but otherwise identical) created as a follow-up. Therefore, I feel qualified to act as an expert on GSM globally, and not just in USA.

However, irrespective of the individual area of expertise of each given leader or moderator or subject matter expert, this community welcomes all users, devotees and appreciators of all 1G, 2G and 3G cellular technologies and of phones based on said technologies - no matter where you are on the globe, and no matter which specific 1G or 2G or 3G technology is of most interest to you.

Who runs this community

This community was created and is owned (top moderator role) by American 2G Cooperative. A2GC is a non-profit corporation in USA (legal entity details will be provided in a separate post) with a mission to build and operate a new GSM/2G cellular network in this country.

You are not required to live in USA or to be a member-patron of A2GC in order to participate in this Lemmy community - and vice-versa, when A2GC launches its core network and starts accepting dues-paying members who get GSM services in exchange for their membership dues, you will not be required to join this Lemmy community in order to sign up for A2GC membership and services. However, the present community and our company’s services are intended for exactly the same target audience (except for the community being world-wide while A2GC is limited in scope to USA), hence it is our vision that the two will remain closely linked.

Other retro cellular technologies

While A2GC is focused on GSM/2G technology in USA, a truly diverse retro mobile phones community needs to include these other technologies too:

  • 1G is an umbrella term for all analog technologies. In USA we had AMPS; internationally some other countries also used AMPS, while others had their own standards such as C-Netz and NMT.
  • The successor to AMPS was D-AMPS, also called TDMA in USA. It is a digital technology in common with 2G, but because it was designed to coexist with AMPS, it is sometimes called 1.5G.
  • In terms of pure 2G technologies, our beloved GSM existed in a state of fierce competition against CDMA and iDEN. Those competing 2G technologies have their own devotees, who are just as welcome in this community as us GSM queens.
  • 3G successor to GSM is UMTS, while 3G successor to original 2G CDMA was/is CDMA2000.

While we as in A2GC are subject matter experts only in GSM, we warmly welcome devotees of all other 1G, 2G and 3G cellular technologies (and phones based on those technologies) into our community. Anyone who joins here as a subject matter expert for any of the non-GSM technologies will be officially recognized as such!