JohnFen 18 hours ago

This could be great for people like me. I won't buy a car that's too new because I don't want a "connected car". But if the cell deprecation means that there's a bunch of cars that are physically unable to connect, and are less desirable to most people because of that, I may be able to get a newer car, cheaper, than I was expecting.

toast0 16 hours ago

5G and LTE were developed with the idea of spectrum sharing. (LTE was intending to share the spectrum for multicast TV, but either way, it's a way to let other things talk in the same spectrum) If the control channel runs in a 4G compatible mode, both 4G and 5G devices can attach and individual timeslots (or whatever the correct term is, cause it's not TDMA) will be encoded differently. Maybe it's a little less spectrum efficient on the control channel, but it makes it more likely to keep 4g devices online than in past updates where a whole block had to be 2g, 3g, or 4g.

Hopefully car makers learned from the 2g/3g shutdown to at least have a way for the (eventually) obsolete modems to not drain your battery when there's nothing to talk to. But then, my 2013 ford shipped with a 2g modem, replaced under recall with a 3g modem, and last I checked doesn't have a viable 4g modem (connected features weren't very useful anyway).