Carriers will start shutting down the country’s oldest cellular network, for analog devices, in February. How to know whether you will be affected:

Cell Phones

whether your phone is less than five years old, or has features like texting, Net access or a built-in camera, it’s not analog. An unknown number of analog handsets are still in use. Carriers say it’s less than 1 percent of all U.S. cell phones. But with 250 million cell phones in use, that could still mean a million phones.

In specific, check phones that are kept around as 911-only phones. Such phones, which don’t have a phone number and aren’t initialized with a carrier, were given out by some donation programs that collected old phones.

The main carriers with analog service are AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless and Alltel. Carriers have been telling analog customers about the shutdown and offering them new digital service plans and phones. Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA have no analog networks.

Separately from the analog shutdown, Alltel and AT&T will finish phasing out networks that use a first-generation digital technology known as D-AMPS or TDMA (for instance Division Multiple Access). that affects only cell phones — and only older ones. AT&T and its predecessor companies have been phasing out TDMA since 2001.

Car Communication Systems

Generally, cars from the 2003 model year and older with OnStar from General Motors Corp., TeleAid from Mercedes-Benz or Lexus Link are affected, and most won’t be upgradable. Upgrade kits are available for most OnStar systems from model years 2004 and 2005.

Class action lawsuits, consolidated in federal court in Detroit, are seeking compensation for the lowered value of the more than 500,000 affected cars with OnStar plus about 200,000 with other systems.

Home Alarms

Affected are burglar and fire alarms that use the analog network as a sole or backup link within the…

Orginal post by Top Tech News