Matisyahu's Blog

Woke up this morning still feeling lousy, coughing all night, sore throat and runny nose – not exactly and enjoyable experience so instead I’m resting up at home in bed and maybe later on I’ll go for a small walk round the block to get some fresh air. I don’t know where it came from given that last week I was feeling good, no symptoms then suddenly out of no where it appeared which is strange because generally you get a sense of a cold of a flu coming on before it eventually hits. What makes it weirder is the fact that we’re in summer.

I received an email from my mobile provider that they’re going to be turning off 3G by the end of March 2026 which raises an interesting question regarding what Spark (I’m with Skinny, which is a Spark sub brand and uses the Spark network) will do with the spectrum they’re currently using for 3G. The frequency I’m interested in is 850MHz and whether they’ll reform it for 4G or 5G but I have a feeling that it’ll probably be used for 5G given that the major carriers are moving their low traffic customers off fibre onto 5G – it saves the network operator from having to pay Chorus and make greater use of the spectrum they already have. I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up seeing operators upgrade 4G modems to 5G modems then use 4G as a fall back in much the same way 3G was the fall back for 4G.

Where I am located I am in a built up area with the closest tower having the following frequencies supported:

700: 4G LTE
1800: 4G LTE
2100: 3G UMTS
3500: 5G NR

850: 3G UMTS
2300: 4G LTE
2600: 4G LTE

An upgrade of 2100 and 850 to 5G would improve the 5G support particularly with the 850MHz implementation which would give a similar coverage that 700MHz does on 4G. There is also the rural connectivity which at the moment just as 4G connectivity (it was 4G from day one) but we may end up seeing 5G appear along side 4G – either sharing spectrum or utilising spectrum put aside in those areas (the three carriers piggy back on the rural connectivity network because it saves them having to roll out their own network to areas with low population density).