How do we encourage devices with upgradable cellular chips?

There are too many phones to count in this Planet. BILLIONS, and maybe 75% or more of them are completely unusable. Most notably, anything from 2010 and before, is now unusable in areas that do not have 3G / GSM, or even older 2G GSM radio towers. Otherwise, these devices work fine. So, how do we prevent this issue from recurring?

Once 4G gets shutdown, all devices from 2010 - 2021 will be completely unusable as regular phones, and it’s going to create a LOT of electronic waste. How can we work together to device a way to replace the internal components of these devices, and reprogram them to work with a newer cellular chip that we can install into the device?

Otherwise, these devices work fine. So, how do we prevent this issue from recurring?

Software developers, particularly web developers, no longer care about minimalism. Non-business users of mobile software pay for data; they expect the services they connect to with that data to be free.

Until these expectations change (I’m not holding my breath), those devices don’t work fine. They’re incapable of running the services and software users want to use and not only is that an important feature, it’s the most important feature.

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Until someone starts with something and delivers I think we can’t do much. You can’t ask or support a tech that it’s not on the market nor in anyone’s idea book.

There’s also the miniaturization challange that makese these kind of things extremely difficult to achieve. Any kind of interconnect cable or socket requires space, materials and engineering cost to integrate. So you’d need to find people willing to spend even more money for devices necessarely less powerful and less portable just to trust that a manufacturer, in two or three years, is gonna release an hardware update for it.
Nobody is gonna fall for that once again (how many devices that had hardware interfaces for accessories are still in production? Zero). Also the average consumer is gonna feel the need to change their smartphone, even just because there’s a new one around.

We are niche and we can’t really make a difference with our market choice (unless it’s a product aimed at us tinkerers) and it’s a really sad truth.

Even if the chips were technically replaceable, the approach wouldn’t be viable for this category of devices today. Radio frequency devices are regulated in most of the world (for safety and interoperability), and both electrical and physical designs are involved in this. The changes to cellular generations aren’t just data protocol, but also frequencies and power levels, which in turn necessitate specific antenna and shielding designs.

On a product level, any design change like this requires the entire product to go through recertification under a discrete model identifier before it can be sold. Once certified, it cannot be altered.

On an operation level, any individual change to the radio components (e.g. replacing with a newer one) typically requires the end user to be licensed.

Since these constraints come from government policies and international treaty agreements, the level of difficulty for change here is significantly higher.

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I think if we spend enough time thinking about it, there is a human being alive today that can probably figure this out!

So, is it not possible to have an integration of the modem chip and antenna in one set? It’s a big issue. Hardware released in just 2015 that relied on 3G is completely useless, and there is just no logical reason to keep designing these devices in this rapid-fire manner, except to make shit-loads of cash. There is no other logical beneficial reason to do so.

I get we just can’t predict the future. So some manufacturer is going to release some new model with a new battery, and not a SINGLE new feature, just because, but then we will have 6G come along and there’s just nothing we can do. That just seems like an oversight to me. But we don’t have the ability from stopping any company from releasing products. Now that’s a slippery slope, but wow is there a lot of crap in the world. So… how do we say to these manufacturers, hey this 3G thing is DONE, nobody is going to support it in about four years. It is not recommended to produce a 3G device for your customers that they’ll be unable to use in five years.

It feels like we have a time-line in place on these things, but it’s not quite in place enough to prevent the above issue.

European cellular standards and now THE worldwide cellular standards are designed to be backward compatible. 3G phones can work on 2G network. 4G phones can work on 2G and 3G networks. 5G phones work on 2G/3G/4G networks. I don’t see the need for upgradable chipset phones. Nor I think it’s a brilliant idea.

Your passion for reducing e-Wastes is respectable. There are many policies and user education could be done to extend the useful life of a phone to 10 years or beyond for a single owner or multiple owners through 2nd hand markets around the globe.

The #1 component failure is the battery. My quick recommendation is always going with a premium AND popular model. New replacement batteries are usually available many years after the original vendor discontinued a popular model. iPhone is an excellent example in this regard. Easy to find new quality replacement battery from Chinese vendors. So in the expected 10 yrs of useful life of a premium phone, 2nd, 3rd or even the 4th owner of such a phone will be able to resource replacement battery and carry on.

EDIT:

Since OP seems to focus on phone design, thinking about it, I think what consumers and phone vendors could do is to ask for repairable designs. In this regard, iPhone is pretty bad in recent years by deliberately locking out 3rd party components. So when you indirectly sell your iphone to a less privileged country, I’m afraid the new owner might not be able to afford Apple’s repair service. That defeats the purpose of reuse. Prematurely shortens the useful life of an otherwise still very capable device.

Yes, it works a bit like wi-fi standards: backward-compatible. But what if, now, this is one hell of a stretch, what if the cellular modems could be upgraded with some kind of universal format for all mobile devices, to operate at any frequency sent out from verified, “certified” cellular towers, and just use whatever frequency of every decade we will use? Too far? Impossible? Insane?

Programmable logic arrays or otherwise known as FPGAs have been available for more than two decades. They’re in an advanced state of implementing very capable application processors and I believe also baseband processors (which responsible for radios that you seem to be interested in). As I said, upgradable phone such as replacing chipsets physically or virtually doesn’t sound like a brilliant idea. I fail to see how that’s going to solve the ambition of reusing phones economically. Nevertheless, interesting thoughts to talk about perhaps.

But forget what I said, pls carry on.

So, as an example, the very last (up to now) lcd-based monochrome display dumbphone is the Nokia 103. Like the third generation or so of the 100 series. So, instead of that equipment being stuck with 2G GSM frequencies, we just break it open and rip out the cellular internal components, and solder in one of these programmable baseband processors that can then be programmed to auto-select the frequency received by multiple nearby cell towers. This way, no new phones need to be produced as often. Just replacement batteries (iPhone DOES do an excellent job at this, $70 replacement batteries!) and maybe whatever else spare parts. It definitely seems doable, and I’m certain, with the framework laptop and the like, there is surely a market for this.

I don’t think that market is now though. I think we have a decade or two for everyone to start caring about e-waste and the like. During this catch-up, e-waste will get SIGNIFICANTLY worse. So, then maybe we’ll have this new market of auto-frequency cellular modems / antennas.

Speaking of antennas, I wonder if there is a future-minded antenna that could work for multiple cellular generations? Yes, again, we have backward compatibility, but that doesn’t really seems to be useful in cellular-rich environments, so I’d like to see future-compatible antennas.

I think the regulatory issue here is being missed. Even if it were technologically trivial to exchange a radio + antenna module on a device, doing so would invalidate the RF emissions and compliance testing that device went through and it wouldn’t be allowed onto the market. Devices that interact in the RF spectrum are closely regulated and cannot be produced in a way by the manufacturer that allows the RF emission characteristics to be easily modified.


This is the same reason your wireless router’s antennae use a reversed SMA connector (now usually called RP-SMA) which is actually the opposite polarity of what a normal SMA bulkhead would be. The original intent was to make it so people couldn’t just go swap out the antenna therefore invalidating the RF emissions compliance, but they became so ubiquitous that RP-SMA pretty much became its own standard and you can easily get them from eBay/overseas now anyway.

So this is a standards and regulatory issue. Well this will require an ingenious solution to do this differently. It seems to require a way to be locked-down in a way that is incredibly difficult to modify by any end-user, because interference, but have some built-in auto-provisioning from some other device, that also can’t easily be hacked into to easily disable / re-route someone’s wireless cellular reception.

O.K. so what company is making 2G / 3G / 4G / and 5G modem chips? Whatever company makes those things, can PROBABLY make them support multiple FUTURE frequencies, OR, PROBABLY push a firmware update with a standardized os, be it iOS or webOS, or even old Symbian, and using that standard system, push an update to the modem firmware, allowing new frequencies.

This just does NOT seem to be rocket science.

A cellular device sends out a certain frequency. Inevitably, that frequency will change. The only logical thing to do, to COMPLETELY ELIMINATE any possible electronic waste, phone bricks, would be to install a cellular transmission / reception device that can be updated via OTA software, or downloadable firmware on a website that won’t be taken offline any time soon. It just doesn’t seem THAT complicated to me.

It’s not just frequencies. Processing higher data rates requires faster processors. Even if old (read: ancient) 2G chips could tune to 5G frequencies, it wouldn’t work.

O.K. so that’s too much of a jump. But am I not correct in thinking that the MODEM in cellphones actually has some kind of ARM based processor? I’ve read some phones have like a 400Mhz modem chip. SURELY, that has more than enough processing speed to keep up with future generations of technology. I cannot POSSIBLY believe, that for basic calling and texting, 400Mhz would not be enough for a basic 128Kbps voice call.

My idea still intrigues me though, can we not just swap in a faster modem chip and antenna into these old bricks? It saddens me to think when I type in “lot of used cellphones” on Ebay, 100% are not usable for calling anymore. We really need to either recycle the materials in them, or make them work with newer cell technology with new modem chips of some kind.

FPGAs are orders of magnitude larger and more power hungry than a dedicated circuit, couple that with the fact you need an FPGA not just capable of emulating the cellular modem you have now, but several generations from now, which will be much more precise and complex and you’ve got a recipe where phones are back to literal brick size and weight and still drain the battery after one text message, or you can get the briefcase phone for that whopping 45 minute talk time.

I don’t disagree with what you said (about FPGA applications for consumer electronics like smartphones).

You’re absolutely right! If we think about why people change mobile phones these days it’s certainly not due to a new phone with a fancy cellular chip. People get new phones cause the battery is fucked or the screen is broken.

My experience with people and mobile phones is two types of people. The latest and greatest people, they will always buy the new and shiny stuff regardless. Then there is the buy it and used it till its done. Done usually means fucked battery or a broken screen.

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Let’s learn from the young and do some activism:

  1. Whenever you can, tell people to buy popular and reasonably decent phones.

It’s much easier to re-sell for reuse by other owners around the globe. It’s much easier to find replacement parts, particularly brand new quality battery. Its service lifespan could well be up to 10 yrs. Helps planet Earth a lot, and helps other people to have chance to reuse quality phones at much discounted prices.

  1. Only buy phones that are designed to be repairable. Send a message to manufacturers to keep their products open for 3rd party repair.

In the old days, almost all electric/electronic goods are easily repairable. WIth ever higher level of integration, consumer electronics are more and more difficult to be repairable, even to some professional hands. Some manufacturers purposely lock down their devices for 3rd party repair. Vote by your money to reverse such evil trends.

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I don’t think 4G is getting shut down soon (probably not before 2025-2027), there’s lots of industrial sensors and modems using it, same as it was the case with GPRS until recently.

… also, somehow I don’t think phones are as big of a problem as e.g. car recycling.

How much do you think it raise the cost of the product to guarantee software security updates for at least 5 or 8 or 10 years?

Google is doing 5 years OS upgrade on their Pixel phones. So the heavy lifting is already paid. Each Android phone vendors will have to do their part of porting the base and potentially updating their UIs and custom apps. Work on old models is incremental. I don’t foresee it requires lots of additional work but surely a nuance. Especially if some models aren’t actually popular.

I was surprised to find the Android situation is actually better than my last check back in 2018.

For example, Samsung is already doing 4 yrs of new OS upgrades and 5 yrs of security updates. Xiaomi is doing 3 yrs of new OS upgrades and 4 yrs of security update. I’m not sure though if the security updates start counting from the final and new OS upgrade or not. If that’s the case, newer Samsung and Xiaomi phones are usable up to 9 and 7 years respectively.

Quite an improvement in four years time.