You know Herman, I saw Daniel unboxing that GPS tracker in the kitchen this morning, and it really struck me how much of a hardware time capsule those things are. You look at the specs and it feels like you are stepping back into two thousand seven. It is February of twenty twenty-six, we have commercial space tourism and AI that can write symphonies, yet here is a brand new piece of plastic that looks like it belongs in a museum.
It really is a strange little niche of the tech world. Herman Poppleberry here, by the way, and yeah, Daniel's prompt is spot on because we are in the middle of this massive, invisible infrastructure overhaul. It is like trying to renovate a skyscraper while everyone is still living in it. Or more accurately, it is like tearing down the old wooden bridge while there are still thousands of cars trying to drive across it.
It is the great sunsetting. We have talked about the internet of things before, specifically back in episode three hundred nine when we were looking at the protocol alphabet soup, but this feels different. This is about the actual physical airwaves. Daniel noticed that his tracker is basically hunting for a signal that, quite literally, was turned off just forty-eight hours ago here in Israel.
Exactly. February first, twenty twenty-six, was the official frequency clearance date set by the Ministry of Communications. If Daniel bought a two G or three G tracker last week, he effectively bought a very expensive paperweight. To understand why this is such a headache, you have to look at spectrum efficiency and the actual physics of the airwaves. Think of the radio frequency spectrum like land in a crowded city like Jerusalem. Back in the two G and three G days, we built these sprawling, one-story buildings. They were great for what they were, they handled voice calls and tiny bits of text data, but they took up a lot of room relative to how many people they could serve.
So five G is the skyscraper?
Precisely. Five G uses much more sophisticated modulation. It can pack way more data into the same amount of "land" or spectrum. Carriers want to "refarm" those old two G and three G frequencies because they are sitting on prime real estate. Specifically, those lower frequencies, like the eight hundred and nine hundred megahertz bands, are the gold standard. They have incredible range and can pass through walls like they aren't even there. Carriers want those frequencies to give thousands of people high-speed video streaming and low-latency gaming instead of just letting a few thousand old GPS trackers send a tiny ping once an hour.
I get the business logic for the carriers, but for the end user, or for someone like Daniel who just wants to know if his car is still in the parking lot, it feels like a forced upgrade. If the data requirement is so low, why do we need five G for a GPS tracker? It is like using a semi-truck to deliver a single postage stamp.
That is the perfect analogy, Corn. And that is exactly why the transition has been so slow and painful. Two G, especially GSM, which stands for Global System for Mobile Communications, was incredibly robust. It was the first truly digital mobile network, launched all the way back in nineteen ninety-one. For a device that only needs to send a few bytes of data, like a latitude and longitude coordinate, two G was perfect. It was cheap, the chips were pennies, and the power consumption was minimal. You could slap a two G module on a shipping pallet and it would work for months on a tiny battery.
But now those networks are gone. In the United States, the shutdown was a long time coming. AT and T and Verizon finished their sunsets years ago, and T-Mobile, which was the final holdout, finally pulled the plug on their two G network in February of last year, twenty twenty-five. They even offered free five G replacement devices to their remaining two G customers just to get them off the old towers.
It is a global trend, and it is not just about phones. The problem is that there are millions of these "dumb" devices out there that we don't even think about. We are talking about smart meters in your basement, elevator emergency phones, vending machines, and those little SOS buttons for the elderly. You can't just flip a switch without breaking critical infrastructure. In fact, the Israeli Ministry of Communications actually had to mandate that carriers keep a dedicated two G slice open specifically for emergency calls until the end of twenty twenty-eight, just to make sure people in older elevators or with legacy medical alerts don't get stranded.
So what is the actual replacement? If five G is too "big" for these devices, what replaces the "small" connectivity of two G?
This is where it gets interesting. We are seeing two main paths that have finally matured. The first is what we call LTE-M, which stands for Long Term Evolution for Machines. It is also known as Cat-M one. This is a simplified version of the four G LTE network we all use on our phones. It is designed specifically for devices that need medium data rates but want very long battery life. It supports mobility, meaning it can hand off from one cell tower to another without dropping the connection, which makes it the absolute best choice for a car tracker.
And the second path is the one Daniel mentioned, right? NB-IoT?
Exactly. NB-IoT, or Narrowband Internet of Things. This is even more stripped down than LTE-M. It uses a tiny, tiny slice of bandwidth, only about one hundred eighty kilohertz. To put that in perspective, a standard five G channel can be one hundred megahertz wide. NB-IoT is like a tiny straw compared to a massive water main. It is perfect for things that stay in one place, like a smart water meter or a soil sensor on a farm. It has even better indoor penetration than LTE-M, but it doesn't handle "hand-offs" well. If you are moving at sixty miles per hour down a highway, NB-IoT might struggle to keep up.
I like the straw analogy. But if it is so small, what is the benefit? Is it just about the spectrum efficiency you mentioned?
It is about three things: cost, battery, and coverage. Because the bandwidth is so narrow, the chips can be much simpler and cheaper to manufacture. More importantly, these devices can use something called Power Saving Mode and Extended Discontinuous Reception. Basically, the device can go into a deep sleep for days or even weeks and then "wake up" just long enough to send its data without having to re-negotiate its entire connection with the cell tower. In a world where we want to connect billions of things, we need that efficiency.
That sounds perfect for a GPS tracker. You don't need the car to be "talking" to the network while it is parked and the engine is off. It just needs to wake up if it senses movement or if you request a location.
Exactly. And the coverage part is key too. Because the signal is so narrow, you can "concentrate" the power. It is like the difference between a floodlight and a laser pointer. That laser pointer, or the NB-IoT signal, can reach deep into basements or underground parking garages where a standard cell signal might fail. That is a huge deal for a car tracker. If a thief hides your car in a concrete parking structure, a standard five G phone might lose signal, but an NB-IoT or LTE-M tracker might still be able to scream its location.
Okay, so if these are so great, why was Daniel still finding two G and three G trackers for sale? Why did it take until twenty twenty-six for this to become the standard?
It was a classic chicken and egg problem, Corn. For a long time, the hardware for two G was just so much cheaper because it had been manufactured in the billions for decades. If you are a small company making GPS trackers, you are going to go with the five dollar chip over the fifteen dollar chip every time. Plus, the global roaming situation for NB-IoT was a mess for years. Two G worked everywhere. You could take a two G tracker from London to Jerusalem to New York and it would just work because GSM was a universal language. NB-IoT required new, specific roaming agreements between carriers that simply didn't exist until recently.
So we were stuck in this loop where manufacturers wouldn't build the devices because the roaming wasn't there, and carriers wouldn't prioritize the roaming because there weren't enough devices.
Exactly. But the sunsetting of the old networks finally forced everyone's hand. By twenty twenty-four and twenty twenty-five, we saw the "roaming floodgates" open. Now, an LTE-M device can roam across North America and Europe almost as easily as the old two G ones did. And that brings us to the newest player on the field: five G RedCap.
RedCap? Like a little hat?
It stands for Reduced Capacity. I know, engineers are great at naming things. But five G RedCap is basically the "Goldilocks" of connectivity. It sits right between the high-speed five G we use for our phones and the ultra-low-power NB-IoT. It was introduced in the three G P P Release seventeen standards, and here in twenty twenty-six, we are seeing it hit the mass market. It is designed for things like high-end wearables, industrial sensors, and advanced automotive tracking.
What makes it better than just sticking with the four G versions like LTE-M?
It brings those devices into the native five G ecosystem. That means lower latency, better security, and most importantly, it ensures they won't be "sunsetted" anytime soon. When you buy a five G RedCap device, you are essentially future-proofing it for the next twenty years. It also allows the network to handle a much higher density of devices. In a future where every car, every bike, and maybe even every pair of glasses is connected, you need a network that can handle millions of connections per square kilometer. Five G was built for that; four G was not.
I'm thinking about the second-order effects here. If we successfully move all these low-data devices to NB-IoT or RedCap, what does that actually change for the average person? Besides Daniel's car tracker working better in the underground garage, of course.
It changes the economics of "connecting everything." When the cost of the chip drops to a dollar and the battery lasts ten years, you start seeing use cases that were impossible before. Think about "smart" shipping pallets that track temperature and vibration for five years without a charge. Or sensors in the soil of every farm that talk to a satellite. It moves us from "the internet of things" being a buzzword to it being a silent, invisible utility. But there is a massive flip side to that, Corn. The environmental impact.
Right, the electronic waste. If we are bricking millions of two G and three G devices, where do they all go?
It is a crisis, honestly. According to the Global E-waste Monitor, the world generated over sixty-two million tonnes of electronic waste in twenty twenty-two alone. By twenty thirty, that is projected to hit eighty-two million tonnes. These network transitions are a huge contributor to that. We are essentially turning millions of perfectly functional pieces of silicon into garbage because the "invisible road" they drive on is being torn up. Only about twenty-two percent of that waste is actually documented as being recycled. It is a huge argument for modularity in design, where you could maybe just swap out the communication module, but in the world of cheap consumer electronics, that rarely happens.
It is also a security issue, though, right? A lot of those older two G devices had very weak encryption, or none at all. Moving to five G RedCap or even LTE-M brings much more robust, modern security standards to these "tiny" devices. It is harder to spoof a signal or intercept the data.
That is a great point. Two G was notoriously easy to "stingray," or intercept using a fake cell tower. For a GPS tracker, that is a pretty big vulnerability if someone wants to track you without your knowledge or jam your signal. The newer protocols are much more resilient. They use mutual authentication, meaning the device and the network both have to prove who they are before they start talking. It makes the whole ecosystem much harder to hack.
So, let's talk about what people should actually look for right now. If someone is in the market for a tracker or any connected device in twenty twenty-six, how do they avoid buying something that is about to be obsolete?
You have to look at the "Cat" rating. That stands for Category. If you see "Cat M one" or "Cat NB one," you are in good shape. Those are the four G-based IoT standards that will be supported for at least another decade. If you want to be on the absolute cutting edge, look for "five G RedCap" or "five G NR-Light."
"NR-Light" being another name for RedCap?
Yes, "New Radio Light." It is the same thing. It is basically the industry saying, "we made five G, but we made a version that doesn't eat your battery for breakfast." And whatever you do, stay away from anything that mentions "GSM," "GPRS," "HSPA," or "three G." Those are the labels of the past. If you see those on a box in twenty twenty-six, the manufacturer is likely just trying to clear out old inventory before people realize the networks are gone.
It is interesting how the technology is almost circling back. We started with these very simple, low-power networks, then we went through this phase of "more speed at any cost," and now we are realizing that for the majority of "things" in the internet of things, we actually need to go back to that low-power, high-efficiency mindset, just with modern security and better spectrum use.
It is the maturity of the technology. We are no longer just trying to see how fast we can go; we are trying to see how broad we can go. How many things can we connect reliably and sustainably? That is the real promise of the five G era, even if the "five G" part of it is actually quite slow for these specific devices. And there is one more frontier we haven't even touched on yet: the sky.
You mean satellite-based IoT?
Exactly. This is the biggest change we have seen in the last two years. Companies like Starlink have fully rolled out their "Direct to Cell" service. As of twenty twenty-five, they have been providing data and IoT connectivity directly to unmodified devices. Imagine a GPS tracker that doesn't care if there is a cell tower nearby because it can send a tiny packet of data directly to a satellite in low earth orbit. We are already seeing this with the latest smartphones, but scaling that down to a ten dollar GPS tracker is the next big frontier.
That would be a game changer for theft recovery. You can't hide a car in the desert or a remote area if it has a direct line of sight to the sky. No more "dead zones."
Precisely. Starlink already has over six hundred fifty of these direct-to-cell satellites in orbit as of January, and they are adding more every month. It is making the whole "tower sunsetting" problem almost irrelevant for certain use cases. If you are a shipping company tracking containers across the ocean, you don't care about two G or five G towers; you just care about the sky.
So, to answer Daniel's question more directly: the future isn't just "faster" five G. It is a more fragmented, specialized version of connectivity. We are going to have the "big pipe" for our phones and the "tiny straw" like NB-IoT and RedCap for everything else, with a satellite safety net over the whole thing.
And the transition is mandatory. The old networks are being repurposed. It is like the digital version of urban renewal. It is messy, it creates a lot of waste, but it is the only way to make room for the billions of devices we want to connect in the future. It is a good reminder for all of us to check the specs before we buy anything "smart."
Great advice. I hope Daniel kept the receipt for that two G tracker if that is what he bought. Knowing him, he probably bought three different versions just to test the signal strength around the neighborhood. He is basically doing his own field research.
He probably is. And honestly, we need more people like that, asking these questions. It is easy to forget that everything we use depends on these massive, expensive networks that are constantly being torn down and rebuilt.
It really is. Well, this has been a fascinating look into the "invisible" side of our gadgets. If you are listening and you have noticed your older devices starting to act up, or if you have questions about the tech in your own life, we would love to hear from you. You can find us at myweirdprompts.com and use the contact form there.
And if you are enjoying these deep dives, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast app or on Spotify. It really helps other people find the show and keeps us motivated to keep digging into these weird prompts Daniel sends us.
Definitely. A quick rating makes a huge difference. Thanks for joining us for episode four hundred twenty-six. We will be back soon with another exploration of the strange and wonderful world of technology.
Until next time, I am Herman Poppleberry.
And I'm Corn. Thanks for listening to My Weird Prompts. We will catch you in the next one.
See ya.
