When Adele Rothman bought her 16-year-old son a car in 2003, she made certain to pick one that had OnStar, the onboard communications and safety system.

What the Scarsdale, N.Y., resident didn’t know was that the OnStar system in the car was already doomed to die. The federal government decided in 2002 to let cellular carriers shut down analog cell phone networks, used by Rothman’s Saab and about 500,000 other OnStar-equipped cars, after Feb. 18, 2008.

It’s the end of the nationwide network that launched the U.S. wireless industry 24 years ago, and it leaves a surprising number of users like Adele Rothman in the lurch.

OnStar told Rothman in March its service would stop at the end of that year, in anticipation of the network shutdown in February. “I was really upset,” she said, “because that was my tieline” to her son.

Perhaps a million cell phones will lose service, but those are cheap and easy

to replace. The effects will be felt the most by citizens who have things that aren’t phones but have built-in wireless capabilities, like OnStar cars and home alarm systems.

The shutdown period has been known years in advance, but some industries seem to have a had a problem updating their technologies and informing their customers in advance, which raises the question of whether the effects will be even more widespread the next date a network is turned off, given the proliferation of wireless technology.

General Motors Corp., which owns OnStar, started modifying its cars after the 2002 decision by the Federal Communications Commission to let the network die, but some cars made as late as 2005 can’t use digital networks for OnStar, nor can they be upgraded. For some cars made in the intervening years, GM provides digital upgrades for $15.

In 2006, OnStar said it had let customers know…

Orginal post by Top Tech News