Here is a video I uploaded to YouTube on August 8th, 2018. This page serves as a duplicate of the video for display on GammaMAXX.com as well as an archival of the description for those who cannot load the video. Any updates to the description will be added here.
Across the U.S. cell phone providers are rapidly phasing out 2G cell service, which is the oldest still-operational cell service in the country. For as long as 2G remains any cell phone made in 1998 or later will still work, but once all the 2G towers are shutdown, they will be paperweights forever.
Verizon Wireless supposedly was going to shut down their 2G towers at the end of 2019 , which would mean that any CDMA cell phones using those towers would never work again, however that date came and went and 2G cell phones still appear to work. 3G cell service, however has been shutdown, at least to my understanding. At the time of this video being uploaded the word was still that 2G was shutting down, so as someone who has a deep appreciation for old technology I took it upon myself to give a quick demonstration of the 2G web browser capabilities before doing so would be impossible.
In this video I perform a quick search using the custom variant of Bing that is designed for these browsers, and I visit a page on my own website. I am not able to show any other websites because the browser cannot understand any form of modern SSL, and therefore any website that is even remotely up to date on their encryption won't load. Unfortunately for my website (But a good thing for this one particular video.) my website has no form of SSL whatsoever, so it loads perfectly fine on the phone, but even then only the article pages will load, which if you visit the page you will see that's about as basic of a layout as you can get. Even though the browser can make a connection it cannot load any other type of page on my site.
This video was originally supposed to be a time capsule to show what 2G internet on a flip phone was like, in my exact words, "and someday in the future some kid is going to wonder what it was like to use the internet on such a primitive piece of hardware, so I made this video to clear some things up for the curious people of the future." Apparently we don't have to worry about that for now, but the video still stands just in case.
The page I visited can be found here: http://www.gammamaxx.com/texts/2.html (As you can see, even with how basic the layout is the phone cannot do a good job of reproducing the site's appearance.)
This page was extensively modified as the original version stated that Verizon was shutting down 2G cell service on December 31st, 2019. This did not happen, so the desciption has been corrected.
Argot
Page created: Wednesday, August 8th, 2018
Page last modified: Wednesday, Janurary 8th, 2020