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AT&T

Ending 3G Service Sparks Fears of an 'Alarmaggedon' (axios.com) 132

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
AT&T's planned shutdown of its 3G network Tuesday has sparked fears that home security systems, medical alert monitors and a range of other devices will stop working. From a report: Carriers have previously retired networks, but this transition is proving more complicated because the pandemic hindered companies that rely on 3G services from making upgrades. Plus, there are just more devices to manage. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon are all planning to shut down their 3G networks this year to support new 5G services. AT&T, which first announced plans to sunset its 3G network in 2019, says less than 1% of its mobile data traffic runs on that network. The company has offered customers free and discounted 4G LTE phones to help them upgrade, totaling about 2 million replacements. What to watch: AT&T says phone coverage will not be affected, but it's not just phones that use the company's 3G network.
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Ending 3G Service Sparks Fears of an 'Alarmaggedon' More

Ending 3G Service Sparks Fears of an 'Alarmaggedon'

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  • Free is right (Score:4)

    by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2022 @01:28PM (#62292169) Journal
    The company has offered customers free and discounted 4G LTE phones to help them upgrade

    This is exactly what they did for me. I was debating which non "smart" phone to get. During that process they contacted me. I told them what I wanted and they sent it to me, free of charge. Had it activated that weekend at the local store.

    Other than running on KaiOS and its idiosyncrasies, no problems. It's a phone and does what a phone does: make and receive calls.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      I'd have loved to have been offered a KaiOS phone. I had high hopes for FirefoxOS and was glad to see it get a new lease on life.

      The only thing they offered me was this absolutely abysmal AT&T Radiant Core running Android Go. It's unusable trash.

    • Re: Free is right (Score:5, Insightful)

      by saloomy ( 2817221 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2022 @01:39PM (#62292201)
      A lot of these devices are not phones though. They are modems for things like fire alarm panels, security monitoring, even older connected vehicles like some Mercedes Benz models with MB connect. Some older computers have old modems that are embedded systems.
      • Some of these could use a local 3G to 5G bridge.

        • that sounds like a real specialty device like say a verizon wifi extender/booster might work...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

          Those devices are in general illegal to use since they cause interference with other services locally.

      • A lot of these devices are not phones though.

        Cell phone carriers have been pushing the Internet of Things for years. Now they suddenly don't want to support it. Be glad IoT wasn't more widely adopted.

        • Indeed. They even created a whole standard dedicated to supporting IoT. It's called 5G. 3G was always an arse stupid standard to try and deploy a sensor network.

          • And yet it was the state of the art for awhile. The telecoms pushed that standard, they wanted everyone to use it, cellular modems were designed around it. Then the telecoms said "Ha, just kidding! Funny joke, huh?"

            At the very least they could put up some cellular repeaters or such.

            • The telecoms pushed that standard

              Did they? Not sure about your crazy telecoms but while 3G was state of the art telecoms here pushed GPRS for IoT (which made far more sense) while in parallel rolling out, LPWAN, LTE-M, and eventually LoRaWAN and NB-IoT.

              It would be crazy for your local telecoms to "push" 3G as a standard when specifically the 3GPP identified it wasn't sufficient for its use to the point of specifically addressing its deficiency in Release 8, which is incidentally not part of what is being shut down.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sjames ( 1099 )

            In the process they orphaned a huge number of existing applications, including a large number of cars and alarm systems. They have also convinced me there is no point in ever developing a device to support 5G since they will surely abandon it very soon (LoRa for the win).

            Meanwhile, if I grab the phone off of my kitchen wall and hop into my slightly modified DeLorean, it will work just fine in the 1950s (just slide the switch to pulse dial).

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by _merlin ( 160982 )

              Meanwhile, if I grab the phone off of my kitchen wall and hop into my slightly modified DeLorean, it will work just fine in the 1950s (just slide the switch to pulse dial).

              You still have analog POTS service on copper pairs? In Australia they've shut that down - the only way you'd be using an analog phone is if you have a device that bridges it to an IP-based service (e.g. an AVM FritzBox). Analog POTS did last longer than any mobile phone standard has, though.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by sjames ( 1099 )

                Some parts of the U.S. have seen the old POTS lines de-comissioned, but in that case they typically get a converter box to bridge their house wiring over to digital.

                I know at least one of my neighbors switched to IP phone service with the broadband provider, mostly because his son comes over once every two weeks or so to call his dad and tell him their phone is out again.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by schnell ( 163007 )

          Cell phone carriers have been pushing the Internet of Things for years. Now they suddenly don't want to support it.

          You're using an odd definition of "suddenly" that means "announced four years ago and delayed at least twice."

          Unlike wireline infrastructure where you can always run another cable, wireless spectrum is limited. With that same 20 MHz of spectrum you can for example serve a few tens of thousands of 10-year-old 3G devices with narrowband service or you can repurpose it to serve millions of 4G or 5G devices with broadband service. Which is a better use for people and the economy overall?

          I say this having been

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        Not sure if the 2G net still is around, some devices do have a fall-back to 2G if 3G isn't available. And 2G may still be available in some areas/countries just because it's a fall-back service.

        Might not work for all carriers and every device.

        And there are likely a large amount of embedded devices out there that suddenly stops to work when 3G is lost and if the 2G fallback is lost then even more devices will be dead.

        And it's as noted elsewhere that it's often alarm devices (like bedside alarms for elderly)

      • Sure. But the real (and only relevant) question is, what contractural terms and obligations does AT&T have to those users? One would think that AT&T's lawyers would have been consulted about the proposed deactivation dates and the (3 years) of advance notification given. If they weren't consulted, a lot of AT&T execs and managers are colossal idiots. That's certianly possible. But I have a hard time believing that in a company like that there wasn't *somebody* involved in the decision who i

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by antdude ( 79039 )

        Also, 5G and 4G don't work well in some areas like rurals while 3G and 1X work decently.

    • Wait, what? You were on 3G until now?

      • Wait, what? You were on 3G until now?

        If all I need is a phone, yes. I make calls, I receive calls. Does 4G or 5G make those calls any better?

      • Wait, what? You were on 3G until now?

        If he's someone that would wait until AT&T offered him a low end free phone to move him to at least 4G, is this any surprise?

      • Hey, we've got devices on 4G now. We obsoleted the 3G (some still in field). Certain that this time at least, 4G would last for the lifetime of hte product. But nope...

    • They gave me conflicting info over whether my 4g LTE phone, a Samsung Galaxy S8+, would still work. About half of the CSRs I've talked to said it should work fine after the 3g shutoff, and the other half say no. After extensive research I think it's going to shut off today.

      When they first contacted me, they claimed it was a 3g phone. I haven't had one of those since 2014. It turns out that Samsung upgraded the branded S8 and S8+ phones to properly use VoLTE, which AT&T now requires. But they never upgra

      • Re:Free is right (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Xenx ( 2211586 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2022 @03:01PM (#62292473)
        As someone that had AT&T and an unlocked S8 when it came out, I know a bit about it. At that time AT&T didn't allow, don't know their current stance, non-branded phones to have wifi calling and voLTE. Not sure if/when AT&T may have changed that policy, but I see references to it still being in place in 2019. The S8 was released in 2017. If AT&T has changed the policy it was likely after Samsung stopped supporting the phone.

        Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like it's AT&T fault your unlocked phone won't work.

        • Perhaps it is AT&T's fault. I've had a heck of a time just getting either entity to acknowledge the absurdity of the situation.

          At least I can take my unlocked Pixel 6 and phone number to a different carrier if I want. Unfortunately AT&T still has the best rural coverage in my area last I checked. But then that was when they had not turned off 3g.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Xenx ( 2211586 )
            Yeah, it sucks either way. AT&T's stance on volte/wifi calling was a big part of why I left. That, and I switched to Mint and dropped my bill drastically. At least in my area, rural but near enough to the population centers, the coverage was similar. That, and hills/trees really cause problems regardless of carrier. I think the T-Mobile network has more dead zones, but those are further off the main roads.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by _merlin ( 160982 )

        I have an unlocked Galaxy S8 with Telstra branding (works with any SIM card, but shows a Telstra logo on the boot screen), and it's worked with VoLTE since day one. The Australian 4G networks have all required VoLTE since launch. The kind of chaos you're experiencing seems to be a uniquely American problem.

  • I can confidently say that capitalism has ensured companies have been responsible and done the right by their customers. Everyone knows that if they didn't then the invisible hand of the free market would flawlessly correct such an inexplicable oversight. /s

    • You know, you're right. If there's one problem that socialist countries don't have, it's the bumps and growing pains that come with obsolescence of one kind of widely available consumer electronics technology and its replacement with another.

      Back in the old country, we didn't have to worry about having wasted money on eight track car stereos and betamax vcrs.

    • Guaranteed a socialist government would either force you to upgrade to 4G or, most likely, have kept you on 2G by not upgrading their network ever.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by suss ( 158993 )

        No, they would be on a completely different standard, or one slightly different, so you couldn't use another country's capitalist network.
        Kinda what East Germany did with television.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by deKernel ( 65640 )

      Why yes Comrade, can you believe the temerity of those Capitalist pigs. You are here for your free phone? Please head over to that line. No no no, not that line but the line past that line. Again, no, that line is for soap, please move five lines down past the soap line.

  • There will be a lot of alarm centrals that use 3G and security cams that won't work after this, that can be kind of catastrophical.

    • While true this deactiviation has been foretold and telegraphed for years and on top of that it has still been pushed back many times so excuses are pretty slim at this point. I had a network of about 150 3G modems that I transitioned over to LTE almost 3 years ago when Verizon gave me a shutdown date of like Jan 2020 and that still hasnt happened.

      Eventually you just have to eat the cost and replace that gear.

    • Those cameras are probably obsolete with blurry and useless images anyway. I recall a survey done of cameras in London a few years ago found that most of them produced images too blurry to be useful in identifying anyone.

    • That's the problem. I don't care if my phone loses its dataplan, it'll save me some money and I rarely use it. But there's infrastructure that uses 3G and 4G that can't readily update. Climb the pole, unmount the device, but the power cord, carry it over to AT&T and say "can you upgrade this modem you bozos?"

  • I got my free phone. I went from a Samsung S6 to a A12. Whoo hoo?

  • "less than 1% of its mobile data traffic" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Saying that "less than 1% of its mobile data traffic" runs through 3G is meaningless. That traffic might well be the most important traffic on all the network. It could be that traffic is full of "just that one message that saves someone's life", times quite a few people. Or maybe not. The volume doesn't say.

    Techie-hipsters like to do this. Shutting out browsers by user-agent string because that's "less than N% of the traffic" is bad enough. Depriving people of essential functionality of their alarm button

    • But why help them? They're not using AT&T devices, so they're not profiting from device sales. If they are companies that depend on these devices, you bet your bottom dollar that those companies would bend over backwards and offer upgrades and stuff to make sure the company continues ... or just shutters. Either way, AT&T wins.

    • For most non-business customers "Here's another phone" usually for free is a pretty good solution. If your 3G phone was still operating in 2022 a new featurephone will probably last you another 10 years.

      For businesses and embedded devices it's definitely a burden but it happened with GSM, it happened with 1G/AMPS, happened to EDGE, it has been happening with 3G for years now and they have kept pushing back the date. At a certain point companies have some amount of responsibility. LTE is a decade old at t

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Over here they're sooner turning off 3G than 2G, because too many "M2M" things are using the latter. Which is fine by me, I still use a nokia 6310. That's not a "new" one; the specs to that look... misguided. And my old one still works.

        But I think this "xG" rat race is a tad stupid. There are roughly three services going on here. Voice, "short" messages (control stuff, text, "M2M" telemetry), and the bulk data that sells so nicely for soooo much money to the smartphone and tablet using "consumer". You can

      • I fully agree though that mobile network providers should be regulated more like utilities. We used to treat the old school phone providers like that, it's crazy that we don't treat their modern replacements the same way.

        Maybe they should be treated like utilities, but what does that even mean in this context? The fact of the matter is that there's limited RF spectrum, and at some point you have to shut down older uses of it for newer, more efficient ones.

        Regulating them more would just formalize the notic

        • I was speaking to utility regulation as a seperate issue from this turnover but part of that could be a more controlled and measured transition for situations like this. Compensation and deadlines could be better enforced with more standardized responses. A bit like how the analog-to-HDTV broadcast signal transition went. There was a clear "This is the end" date for all parties (even though it was pushed once), businesses and consumers and there was a federal and business plan to transition everyone in a

          • Didn't that happen here? There was published end dates (that got pushed in response to feedback) and UE replacement programs.

      • LTE is a decade old at this point and hardware is cheaper than it's ever been and for low bandwidth devices like medical monitors and alarms LTE has lots of cost and reliability options as well with things like LTE-M, Cat-M1, NB-IoT specifically tuines for such devices.

        So broadly speaking 4G has only been available for a decade, with reasonable options for substantially less.

        This gives a service life for some hardware of maybe 5 years. That's beyond awful for permanently installed things like alarm systems.

        • And 3G has been around for about 20 years with the turnoff date announced with at least 4 years of warning (I got a notice from Verizon in 2018). If you are an alarm company you knew this was coming and your 3G modems are likely over 10 years old and more likely 15. If you were deploying 3G in the past 5 years you were short sighted to say the least and you should have mature 4G devices in your pipeline by now.

          • And 3G has been around for about 20 years

            Another thing that lasts 20 years is patents. Carriers shut down service on an air interface about when essential patents on the air interface are set to enter the public domain.

            • I mean maybe? That's a bit of conspiracizing without seeing what aprticular patents were expiring and what they pertain to. In any case the infratructure manufacturers are no longer interested in keeping production lines for 3G transmitters, the modem companies are also not interested in producting CDMA/GSM radios and the carriers would like to reclaim that spectrum for faster services. No matter how long you keep 3G service online you can't make it any faster.

              Expecting any type of royalty free or patent

  • My employer uses a custom written app that ran on literally thousands of older cellphones using 3G cellular. These were issued to truck drivers to scan in packages to track them as they progress to getting delivered.

    We had to write an updated app to work on newer Android devices on a 4G LTE network, and we barely made the deadline to complete the app before 3G was shut off. We're deploying the new devices like crazy to hundreds of locations and working overtime supporting the new system as people get used t

    • How long of notice did you get for the 3G shutdown?

      • How long of notice did you get for the 3G shutdown?

        Well, AT&T rolled out 4G a good ten years ago across most of the country. I'd say, a decade, roughly.

      • The notice was probably around 2 years. I have a monitored cell alarm system I put in. The monitor company gave me a heads up about 2 years ago that the 3G link would be end of lifed. I put in a new communicator about a month ago. Unsurprising, the new one is smaller (much) has more features and dropped in easily. They also dropped the rate from 15 to 13/mo. Nice.

        • Yep -- sounds about right. 2 years ago would have been when they started work on the revamped application. The thing is, this was a pretty critical app for the company's daily operation and not a change to take lightly. I'm sure there were plenty of discussions about other changes that needed to be coded in as part of its roll-out, since the opportunity to move to a whole new app release wasn't one we'd get very often. As these things tend to go -- they went down to the wire before doing a "code freeze" a

          • Well, human nature that procrastination... I upgraded about a month ago and could have upgraded 2 years ago when I was first notified. I could kick myself though, would have saved 48 bucks in that 2 years. (24x2) I am ok with it though, I saved thousands by kicking adt to the curb years ago.
  • 2021 Subaru purchased in March 2021, "telematics module" stops working exactly at midnight on 1/1/22 (AT&T is the carrier, no option). Dealer replaced it gratis, but no one would confirm what I already knew, the module was 3G on the voice side, so AT&T cut it off. AT&T's own refusal to support VoLTE on an unlocked handset also cost them a customer (me) to Tmobile who supported the builtin VoLTE client just fine on the same phone, just a SIM swap.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by crow ( 16139 )

      Fortunately my 2015 car came with 4G. There's really no excuse for automakers not switching over years ago. Of course, automakers are notorious for sticking with old technology.

  • It's not just 3G (Score:4, Insightful)

    by taustin ( 171655 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2022 @02:33PM (#62292387) Homepage Journal

    As we upgrade our 40 year old PBX phones to VOIP, we're finding that half the time, we can't even get a POTS line for the alarms, and the other half time, it's at least $100/month. A lot of commercial alarms are on POTS lines, and alarm companies are having a hard time getting the equipment needed for conversion to any kind of cell connection.

    There's a lot of aging technology being retired, with little regard for customers who are still using it for some damned important stuff.

    • In this case, though, there's plenty of "regard" for those customers. They've had three years (An eternity, in tech.) of official notice. And anyone with half a brain already knew that obsolete networks eventually get decommissioned and saw the 3G sunset coming as soon as 4G was ubiquitous and the carriers started planning 5G. It's not like AMPS or IDEN were kept around indefinitely either.

      You remember the old professors' saying: "A lack of preparation on your part does not constitute an emergency on my

      • > They've had three years (An eternity, in tech.) of official notice.

        I think the problem is that the pace technology advances (or thinks its advancing) and obsoleting prior technology gets more problematic the larger the established base gets.

        You could obsolete stuff in 2005 in 3 years because almost nobody would still be using it -- the performance/usability gains basically paid for replacing it outright. But as technology got better, the useful life of devices got much longer as well as replacement te

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        And anyone with half a brain already knew that obsolete networks eventually get decommissioned

        It's a treadmill to keep subscribers using patented air interfaces. This makes the public domain irrelevant.

  • I found some of the communications about these shutdowns very inadequate. They oftentimes read as though they are removing the ability to provision phones and make phone calls rather than decommission the hardware itself. If it was as simple as simply replacing the equipment or adding a dongle it would be no big deal.
    I have quite a few CDMA devices that do NTP and network timing, and it's not the cost of replacing the equipment that's the problem it's the thousands of dollars a month of roof space for anten

  • What is not being taken into consideration (Score:3)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2022 @02:41PM (#62292411)

    Is rural customers and those who like to make calls away from civilization. Because verizon ended their 3G service and sold off their bandwidth, the range of their signals has been cut to at least half (which is much larger for area) and verizon had the most coverage. Now ATT is shuttering their 3G service which leaves a large hole. The lower the signal frequency, the further the range. (both had 850MHz bands). 5G (which means a lot of different things) is generally implemented with much higher frequencies and has very limited range, with ranges from a cell tower measuring only in a few km vs 10's of km from sub 1GHz bands. If you were one of those customers that only existed far away from a cell tower, now you have no service and no alternatives to switch to (verizon has suggested that you enable wifi calling for those who have poor service in their house).

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tomz16 ( 992375 )

      (both had 850MHz bands). 5G (which means a lot of different things) is generally implemented with much higher frequencies and has very limited range, with ranges from a cell tower measuring only in a few km vs 10's of km from sub 1GHz bands. If you were one of those customers that only existed far away from a cell tower, now you have no service and no alternatives to switch to (verizon has suggested that you enable wifi calling for those who have poor service in their house).

      It's not a frequency limit since ALL carriers currently have vast swaths of 800MHz, 700MHz and even 600MHz. They can (and typically do) deploy voice+data+sms on those frequencies using 4G+volte or standalone 5G with the same range characteristics. It's simply lack of continued investment in rural coverage (i.e. it's cheaper to just take down an existing, under-utilized 3G cell site than to take it down AND replace it with brand new equipment + backhauls). It's a capitalism problem, not a physics/spectrum

      • It's not just the 'swaths' of bandwidth, and you are right, it is an economics problem (but it is also a physics propagation problem).

        The problem is no carriers want to do low speed voice (anymore), they want to do high speed data. This is leaving customers that want low speed voice and have coverage in the dark. Sprint and

        High frequency signals do not propagate as far https://powerfulsignal.com/cel... [powerfulsignal.com]

    • You are completely lost in this. They sold their low 700MHz band to AT&T back in 2013 as they couldn't use it at the same time as their blanket high 700MHz band. The 700MHz band was never used for 3G and was always used for LTE. Now, The purpose of decommissioning the 3G network is to REUSE the frequency for LTE and 5G services, not to sell the spectrum. Since 3G networks are smart enough to modulate depending on multiple of reasons to minimize noise, so what you say of worse coverage happened when the
  • Many many other services/devices use wireless data service and they are not as easy to replace as a phone. I currently have few things:
    - Home security system
    - Solar management

    These two things use their own wireless data service (I don't even know which carrier) to communicate with the provider. Home security system operates on batter and backup power so that I get a notification even during power loss. The solar management system communicates system status and performance data with the provider, some o

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by crow ( 16139 )

      My solar inverter and gateway have ethernet, WiFi, and cellular. When they installed them, the configured them to use my WiFi, with the cellular as a backup. Fortunately, they're 4G, but they were just installed in September.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )

      Many many other services/devices use wireless data service and they are not as easy to replace as a phone. I currently have few things:
      - Home security system
      - Solar management

      I wonder if that's why the title of the post mentions alarmaggedon and the first line talks about alarm systems and not phones.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      When 2G was getting cut off a couple of years ago, my alarm company contacted me to schedule an upgrade to the cellular service.

      All they did was change the external wireless box from a 2G to a 4G LTE one - the unit contains the modem and a controller that talks to the modem and interfaces with the panel.

      The panel is a standard panel so it doesn't need upgrading - the modem part is "smart" and talks whatever communications protocol it needs.

  • Oh, it isn't just a 3G problem. You see, ATT, in typical ATT fashion, is using the 3G shutdown to 'delist' a bunch of certified devices. I'll give you an example. I have a MOFI4500-4GXeLTE wireless broadband modem. I have a data card that I purchased (prepaid) and gave them my IMEI. They turned it on, and I've been using it for home internet ever since (55 bucks a month for 100 GB prepaid).

    They don't seem to LIKE that I'm using my own device, so I just got an email saying they are terminating my acc
    • Everything you say might be true. But keep in mind that you are also probably one of the very few people in the world in such a situation and the customer service consists of people who read scripts and make $15/hr. And probably it costs them money to have you as a customer given your unique situation. And so, yeah, they will probably be happy if you go to another carrier.

    • If there was ANY other option that was comparable, I'd be using it in a second.

      Why aren't you using T-Mobile broadband?

  • Lack of planning (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Necron69 ( 35644 ) <jscott.farrow@gm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Tuesday February 22, 2022 @03:40PM (#62292643)

    ADT replaced my alarm system phone module two years ago for exactly this reason. Any company that hasn't done this yet is just plain incompetent.

    - Necron69

  • because the pandemic hindered companies that rely on 3G services from making upgrades.

    It is indeed a bad time to force lots of companies and services into upgrading. The pandemic scrambled everything such that the relatively smooth rhythms of commerce that were in place are shattered.

    I know I get less done at work because the pandemic created chaos such that we spend more time cleaning up proverbial broken windows than making new ones. Things and situations we took for granted just evaporated; all our chee

    • * Just like Axios
    • * I hope to communicate to the world
    • * Entirely in bullet points
    • * Because I can no longer form coherent thoughts
    • * Without the filter of PowerPoint
  • It's events like this that bring out all people with excuses about why they want to continue living in the past, even though updating to a device made within the last five years will cost them almost nothing.
    As for the companies that haven't updated their equipment, today is an example of why they don't deserve your business.

  • I'm glad I don't have a connected CPAP machine. I stayed low-tech, and give my doctor readouts from the front panel.

    When I do finally have to get a connected machine, because the old one has given out, hopefully it won't have network problems.

    There's a lot of unintended consequences to keeping those with lots of disposable cash on the bleeding edge and happy to spend more disposable cash. This is also infrastructure, and infrastructure (along the lines of roads), probably shouldn't be entirely left up to fr

  • This would have ended my dog's tracker but I canceled the service a year ago because it didn't work for shit.

    On the plus side, Amazon can't spy on my old Kindle anymore.

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