Analog Cell Phone Networks to Close Monday

Do you have a relative who bought a cell phone in the early 90s and has refused to upgrade again and again? Do you live somewhere that only analog cell phones reach? Well, to the chagrin of upgrade-phobics and farmers alike, AT&T and Verizon are ending their analog networks on Monday. Other major providers like T-Mobile and Sprint never had analog networks/

The biggest U.S. mobile operators, AT&T Wireless and Verizon Wireless, will close down their analog networks that day. At the same time, AT&T will turn off its first digital network, which uses TDMA (Time-Division Multiple Access) technology. (Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA don't have analog networks.) Calls to some small, rural mobile operators indicated that most of them plan to shut down AMPS, too.

There aren't many mobile phones out there that will go dark after the analog sunset, according to the big carriers, which have been warning subscribers about the change for months and offering them incentives to switch over.

"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.

It will be interesting to see what the actual outcry is, especially since those most likely to be impacted are the old and poor. Exactly those least able to deal with change or spring for a new phone.