District 13 is alive and well, and so am I! We survived an attack by the Capitol, and we remain fully operational.

More seriously: this morning, 2026 August 3, the gang of criminals who exercise corporate control over T-Mobile USA and along with it, over the great legacy GSM network that was once called VoiceStream, executed a devastating strike against this network. Over the course of several hours this morning, beginning around 6 AM EDT and ending just before 7 AM PDT, those miscreants shut down GSM/2G services over most of the country. Confirmed losses along the Pacific coast of USA (the only part of the country that I am familiar with) include Washington state and much closer to me, Southern Los Angeles - as well many other losses in other parts of the country that I know nothing about.

However, in my home county of San Diego, California, VoiceStream (or T-Mobile if you like) GSM/2G service is still up as I make this post! This morning I was watching YouTube livestreams by some members of Discord+Reddit vintage mobile phone community, and I saw it in real time as the gentleman in WA state and the other gentleman in South LA lost their service. As they ended their livestreams upon loss of all GSM signals in their respective areas, I kept watching the signal at my home in the town of Ramona, and saw that it was still up just fine. I then got dressed, got into my car and hit the road: I set out to visit every spot in my home county where in the recent months I've been getting good TMO 2G signal, and check as many of those spots as I can.

I am pleased to report that I have now driven over almost all of my usual roaming range, and in every spot where I have had good signal over the past several months, it is still there! I am making this post from the Panera Bread location in Mira Mesa, next to the Regal Edwards cinema, and I get super-strong signal here. I get similarly good signals in select spots in Oceanside, Escondido and best of all, my home town of Ramona!

Since it has now been almost 8 hours since 6 AM in my time zone, and since all known shutdowns happened within close proximity to the stated 6 AM local time, I shall go out on a limb and hope that San Diego may be one of those lucky few locations that have been spared in this round. I have heard reports that T-Mobile 3G is still up in some very small select spots in the country, even though it was officially shut down nationwide in 2022 - hence I hope that 2G in San Diego may be in the same status.

But of course now is not the time to become complacent - the evildoers will never be satisfied until all of us are either dead or living pointless, meaningless lives without our beloved technology - and we must not give them that satisfaction! I am continuing my work to improve Osmocom GSM network software, which will be used for the "above-ground" network of American 2G Cooperative, and can also be used for personal defiance solutions like the one in this post.

I realize that for many people playing with old cellular technologies (phones or network components) may be just a hobby - but for me it is a lot more. I have given decades of my life to GSM, and it is one of several causes for which I would be quite happy to actually die - and I fully mean it. So to everyone who seeks to take away GSM/2G service from me and anyone else like me - it is just like how Suzanne Collins said it through her character Katniss Everdeen: If we burn, you burn with us!

Earlier this month I created a new community devoted to retro mobile phones. I specifically chose RetroLemmy as host instance for reasons that should be obvious: focus on retro technologies. But I am very new to the fediverse (refugee from Reddit), and back on that other site I never owned or moderated a sub - hence I am new to the realities of community management as well. So far I am the only one who has posted in my newly started community, others have only commented - but no problem, everyone has to start somewhere.

Because of federation, and because Lemmy UI appears to always show /all by default (as opposed to just those communities which you are subscribed to, which was my experience on Reddit), the posts which I've been making in my niche community, devoted to a highly specialized and niche topic, have been showing up in feeds of people who have absolutely no interest in the topic at hand - or worse, have an extremely negative, hostile view regarding the retro technology I am passionate about. These non-participants have been heavily downvoting my retro community posts, and one particularly nasty person came into my 2G-centric community to make comments about how much they hate 2G and want it to die. So now I am thinking that it may be necessary to resort to use of moderation powers, perhaps even bans if gentler means fail, to keep haters out and control their damage. But before I do anything along those lines, I need to ask instance admins and fediverse elders in general for their guidance - hence this post.

First question to admins of this instance: would it be acceptable if I set rules in my community that prohibit bashing comments and malicious downvotes? Bashing here means a comment by someone with no interest in the topic at hand who came to comment only to tell us how much our retro tech sucks and how stupid we are to engage in this hobby etc. A malicious downvote means a downvote driven by the same motivation, dislike of the very topic that our community centers around. I would like to make a rule in retromobilephones community that bashing comments and downvotes are prohibited, and that repeat offenders will be subject to bans. Question to RetroLemmy instance admins: would such community rule be acceptable?

A second question is how to deal with hate that comes in the form of downvotes rather than comments. A hateful comment can be removed by a mod - but can a mod also remove malicious downvotes? If someone gets banned from a community, I assume the ban will make further downvotes impossible, but will it also wipe out already-made downvotes - or do those stay? And is there a gentler method that could be used before resorting to bans? With hateful comments, I reason I can remove the offending comment and let the commenter know that they broke the "no hate" rule, such that repeat offenses will result in a ban - but the first offense gets only comment deletion, not a ban. Is there any way to handle downvotes similarly, some way to remove a downvote without reaching for the ban hammer as first response?

Any advice or guidance would be appreciated - TIA!

Earlier this week I migrated www.freecalypso.org to a new server, and that migration had a side effect of taking all of my Mercurial code repositories offline. (It happened this way because only the static file archive was migrated initially.) I am now pleased to report that all FreeCalypso and Themyscira Wireless Hg repositories are back online at this new location. Old URLs still work as well, handled via HTTP(S) redirect.

The new hosting setup for FC and ThemWi should be much more responsive than our old server that was overrun to death by AI scraper bots, and unlike the band-aid solution that was applied between May 11 and now, the new server is set up much more thoughtfully and properly. Because of the way Mercurial works, its hgweb facility is required for all public read-only access to hosted repositories: not only for casual browsing akin to cgit, but also for native clone and pull operations over HTTP(S). And because hgweb is implemented in Python like most of Mercurial, all operations that invoke it are expensive in terms of server load. Our new server has the following improvements over the old one in this regard:

1. Instead of using simple-minded CGI between the web server front end and hgweb (a new process spawned for each and every request), we now run a dedicated back end server that consists of long-lived worker processes, Green Unicorn specifically for hgweb.
2. The proxy path from lighttpd front end to Gunicorn/hgweb back end passes through Anubis - hence all incoming HTTP(S) requests get their souls weighed, and malignant bots get blocked. It is the same solution that has been adopted by Osmocom (our primary inspiration), Linux kernel cgit and many others.

All static content is still served by lighttpd like before, although we got an update to a newer version of this light daemon. Because so much of our published content is in the form of "raw" FTP-like trees of directories and files, I felt it was very important to preserve the look of directory listings and the assignment of MIME types to files - this consideration was the main impetus for staying with lighttpd, as opposed to the other considered option of moving to nginx.

As another point worthy of note, we no longer force HTTPS onto users against their will! All HTTP(S) resources are equally accessible at both http:// and https:// URLs, and neither redirects to the other - so use whichever you prefer. My personal philosophy is that HTTPS "security" is utterly useless and constitutes nothing but security theater, especially for a site like ours that has no login mechanism, no ability to collect anything from users or visitors, just a public read-only resource made free to the world - but we have a ton of legacy URLs with https in them, plus some people will complain loudly if we went "insecure" only. Hence our solution: use whichever protocol you like, let each user choose for herself.

And finally, never forget good old FTP! On our new server both /pub and /members static file resources are accessible via both FTP and HTTP(S) - so now you have a choice of 3 protocols for downloading our static content 🙂.

American 2G Cooperative (A2GC) is the company that "owns" the present Lemmy community in the sense of holding the top moderator role. The purpose of this post is to provide the necessary legal info and contact details.

A2GC is a non-profit corporation seeking federal tax-exempt status under Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(12) as a mutual or cooperative telephone company (please note it is a different type of tax-exempt non-profit entity from the usual 501(c)(3) - see IRS publication 557), and like all tax-exempt non-profit entities, we are required to publicly disclose our management structure, bylaws, financial details and so forth. While our website is still under construction, the key basics are as follows:

We are a Delaware corporation, our incorporation file number with the state of DE is 10180871, and our federal EIN is 33-4896531. Our physical office address is 16870 West Bernardo Drive, Suite 400, San Diego, CA 92127 - however, because we don't employ any full-time staff, only part-time volunteers, in-person meetings at our office location are available only by appointment. Contact details for our current corporate officers are as follows:

Ms. Mychaela Falconia, President & CTO: [email protected]
Ms. Jessica Westerman, Secretary: [email protected]
Ms. Shannon Hogan, Treasurer: [email protected]

To see our official Certificate of Incorporation, bylaws and other documents which we are required to make public, please look in our documents directory.

Please see other posts in this Lemmy community for more information about our actual work and how we seek to build a new GSM/2G network in select rural and remote locations in USA.

Questions and comments

If you would like to get in touch with us, you can do so either publicly or privately as you prefer. To contact us privately, please email any of our officers at the addresses listed above. Of course you can also send postal mail to our office address, but email will be much faster. Alternatively, if you have some suggestions or questions or comments that would be of benefit to the larger community, and may form a basis for discussion, please create an account in Lemmy fediverse (on any instance of your liking), join this community and post here. We are not on Reddit or Discord, just here on Lemmy.

Some people on That Other Site are asking about the status of my work with regard to the various GSM/2G-related projects I lead, most important of which is A2GC. I am still unable to post on that evil site, so I am going to post this summary here and then rely on other people to post a link in r/vintagemobilephones.

Here are my project-related activities at the present moment:

1. A lot of my time and energy went into the still-ongoing migration of old FreeCalypso archives and repositories to my new server. While I cannot share the full details without violating other people's privacy, our old server setup that goes back to 2015 had some fundamental flaws in its design that went too deep to be fixed organically via small incremental changes - hence wholesale migration to an entirely new server was the only solution I could come up with. The current status of this migration is that all static files have been moved over, but there is no public access to Hg repositories at the moment. Restoring public access to these Hg repos is a remaining high-priority task on this front.
2. The latest word from T-Mobile is that they are going to shut down what is left of their unloved GSM/2G network on August 3. As of the present moment I still rely on that network for within-family communication during times away from home. Given this imminent threat of shutdown, I have to put a higher priority on a side project that has been on my mind for some years now: set up a portable GSM BTS in my car, a sort of personal "cell on wheels", with a Raspberry Pi serving as the BSC, using an LTE mobile Internet link to connect to the fixed server that acts as the MSC. I have a separate post for discussion of that idea.
3. Once I get past the two urgent tasks listed above (both of which count as "putting out fires"), my main goal toward A2GC proper is to implement the new MSC that has been an outstanding need for a while now. We need to have this MSC implemented before we can operate a proper, above-ground GSM network, and I have set a personal goal to implement it before the end of 2026.
4. Macrocell BTS for above-ground GSM deployment: just like I said in my last days on Reddit, we (A2GC) have settled on Nokia BTS hardware, specifically Flexi Multiradio family. We have radio modules for both GSM850 and PCS1900 bands, as well as system and transport modules to go with them. Multiradio concept means that a single radio module can put out any combination of 2G, 3G and/or 4G RATs (radio access technologies), either by connecting multiple system modules (one for each RAT) to the same radio module(s), or by using the newer FSMF (Multiradio 10) system module that does all 3 RATs in one. Since our primary focus is on GSM/2G RAT only, we have stocked up on 2G-specific ESMB system modules, but we can also switch to FSMF if need be. The setup of ESMB driving a Multiradio RFM, with Osmocom BSC driving the ESMB via icE1usb, has already been proven working in our lab. Some further improvements to OsmoBSC software are needed: in particular, we need to teach OsmoBSC how to drive all 3 sectors on the same BCF, which is the config required for a standard 3-sector site. I plan to get back to these OsmoBSC improvements after Hera MSC, which is the previous point.

One detail which I need to re-emphasize with each of these periodic status updates is that we are not going to begin the process of applying for a license with FCC, or even make a final decision as to exactly which geographic location we are going to pursue first, until after we complete a whole bunch of preparatory work. The prep work which we need to complete before applying for our first license consists of Hera MSC (see item 3 above), OsmoBSC improvements for 3-sector macrocell BTS (see item 4 above), and also some FPGA work which I will write about later, creating a low-latency, production-quality interface from OsmoBSC and tw-e1abis-mgw to E1 Abis.

The reason for doing things in this order has to do with FCC rules section 22.946: once we get our first GSM850 license, a clock will start ticking, and we will need to bring our first GSM system fully live within 1 year of license grant. Needless to say, we should do as much of our homework as possible before we start this clock! All work on BSC and MSC components is location-independent, in that all technical requirements remain exactly the same no matter which location we deploy in, and also the same between GSM850 and PCS1900 bands - hence it makes the most sense to complete all of this work before beginning negotiations with property owners at our envisioned candidate locations.

In conclusion: Rome was not built in one day, and we still have a long road ahead of us before we go to the steps of finalizing on a specific location and applying for a license there. But we are not giving up, and the necessary background work is still ongoing.

For several years now I operate a sysmoBTS 1002 at my home, along with a server that runs the requisite suite of osmo-* processes. The result is my own self-made GSM signal at my home; I call this network Themyscira Wireless, named after the fictional home of Wonder Woman. This home network of mine is interconnected with real PSTN via SIP, such that my ThemWi phone has a real phone number, can call any outside numbers and can receive calls from the outside world. For the past 3 years or so I've been using this home GSM system as my primary personal phone - while I do have a traditional POTS land line as well and will never give it up willingly either, ThemWi GSM is more convenient most of the time.

But of course it works only when I am at home, effectively an exotic type of cordless home phone. For the past 2 years or so I have got into the routine where every time I leave my home for an errand, I turn off my ThemWi phone (to save battery), boot up my T-Mobile 2G phone, then drive away from home - then do the same in the reverse when I come back home. A royal pita, plus having to manage two different phone numbers for home stay vs being out and about.

But now there is word going around in Discord and Reddit vintage mobile phone communities that the evildoers at TMO are going to fully shut down their unloved GSM service on August 3. But if they think for even one nanosecond that I am going to roll over and accept a "modern" (VoLTE-based) phone into my life, they are very mistaken... I have never used a "modern" smartphone and never will!

So what do I do now? For some years now I have had the idea of operating a BTS in my car, as a kind of cell on wheels that travels with me wherever I go. Have another little sysmoBTS 1002 (see product link above) reside in the back seat of my car, with a little Raspberry Pi next to it, interconnected with an Ethernet cable. The Raspberry Pi is to be equipped with an LTE data modem - initially in USB stick form factor, later I will explore a more permanent RPi "hat" solution. The software running on the RPi will maintain a WireGuard VPN connection (running over LTE mobile Internet) to one of my servers acting as the MSC, while osmo-bsc will run on the RPi itself inside the car. The resulting arrangement can be seen as a mobile (on wheels with a gasoline engine) LTE to GSM converter, using the local LTE network wherever I go and giving me GSM.

A Digi-Key order for the necessary RPi components has been placed a few hours ago; when the RPi 3B arrives, I will start playing with Devuan on it, and turning this idea into reality. Stay tuned!

P.S. If you are going to comment about legalities, don't bother. If someone without a clue were to do what I describe, then yes, they will very likely cause interference with other networks, FCC will throw the book at them, and they will get what they deserve. However, I know what I am doing - I know where unused blank spots are in GSM-usable spectrum, and I know how to operate my BTS (both home-based and vehicle-based within my known travel range) in such way that it never interferes with anyone and therefore there will never be any basis for anyone to complain to FCC - there is literally nothing to complain about when I don't interfere with anyone or anything.

Since this community is open to an international audience and since many people online (whether they live in USA or not) are woefully misinformed about the state of GSM/2G services in this country, this post is being made to set the record straight.

For a long time, since at least 2001 (and even earlier if we include these companies' predecessors) and through the end of 2016, there were two nationwide GSM/2G networks available in most of the country: Cingular Wireless (rebranded to AT&T in 2007) and T-Mobile USA, former VoiceStream. Then on 2017 January 1 AT&T shut down their GSM network (the one that used to be Cingular), leaving T-Mobile as the only available GSM network in most locations.

Current state of T-Mobile 2G

TMO have been waging a war against 2G since at least 2018 - in that year I (Mother Mychaela, author of this post) encountered for the first time a specific location in my area (a neighborhood in San Diego) in which T-Mobile turned off their 2G signal (leaving only 3G and 4G) and refused to turn it back on when I called to complain. Then in 2019 I discovered for the first time that T-Mobile started issuing maliciously modified SIM cards: their newly issued SIM cards have GSM 11.11 SIM application removed (DF_GSM directory missing in the SIM file system), causing their SIMs to not work in phones that don't speak the newer USIM-ME interface protocol that was introduced for 3G.

In the present time (as I make this post on 2026 June 4) T-Mobile GSM/2G network is still up in certain locations. I live in Ramona, CA, a small town in San Diego County, and both in our little town and in San Diego proper I experience the same situation: some spots have perfectly strong signal while other spots are dead zones. However, the quality of service on this network is very severely degraded:

• Clear voice quality is attainable only if you intentionally seek out a spot with the very strongest signal level, which may require some driving. Everywhere else outside of these select strong spots, your phone will typically show some bars of signal and will have good enough service to send and receive SMS - but when you try to talk with voice, it will be very choppy, making conversation very difficult.
• Talking while driving or riding in a moving vehicle is impossible - the call will drop. Instead you have to pull over in order to talk on the phone, and be completely stationary.
• Even in idle mode (outside of a call), as soon as you start moving, your phone will very likely drop to no service and will only reacquire service after some delay when you become stationary again, assuming that the destination you drove to has service.

In technical terms, there are two factors contributing to this abysmal quality of service:

• TMO operate their unloved GSM service in the guard bands around their 15 MHz wide LTE signal in PCS1900 band. In itself this arrangement would be perfectly fine - one can operate a high-quality GSM service in guard bands around LTE. However, the problem with how TMO do it is that they emit their guard band GSM signals at much lower power level than the LTE "curtain" they surround. The result is that GSM phones receive signal with a very poor C/I (carrier to interference) ratio, which leads to choppy voice connection.
• Every GSM cell continuously emits so-called system information messages on BCCH (broadcast control channel); among other important info, these SI messages provide a list of neighboring cells. Phones use these broadcast neighbor cell lists in order to reselect from cell to cell in idle mode: when your phone is in idle mode outside of a call, it is camped on a particular cell (called the serving cell), but it has to constantly monitor signal strength of neighbor cells in order to detect movement and thus know when to reselect to a different cell, and to which. The problem with today's state of T-Mobile 2G is that they broadcast completely bogus neighbor cell ARFCNs in their SI messages, causing phones to look in the wrong place when movement occurs. Furthermore, those bogus neighbor cell ARFCNs they broadcast aren't empty, instead they correspond to spots in PCS1900 band that are now occupied by wideband LTE signals - confusing GSM phones that expect valid GSM signals on those ARFCNs where the serving cell told them to look for neighbor cells.

Artificial blocking of new users and phone switchers

One of the most sinister hostile actions done by today's TMO against 2G users is artificial blocking. The following anti-human behaviors have been observed so far:

• While SIM cards issued by TMO themselves are maliciously modified to remove GSM 11.11 SIM application, some TMO-based MVNOs still provide SIM cards that have GSM 11.11 support. However, at that point a network-level block kicks in: TMO's core network sees a non-VoLTE phone connecting, they check the account and see that it is new (not "grandfathered"), and they boot that phone off the network. The block appears to be based on IMEI: VoLTE-capable phones configured to operate in 2G mode don't get disconnected, certain old phone IMEIs that didn't make the blocklist get by, and those users who are able to change their IMEI have also reported success.
• Some GSM phone enthusiasts are not content with using just one particular old phone, instead they have a large collection and like to move their legacy ("grandfathered") T-Mobile SIM between phones. Recent reports indicate that TMO started blocking such users as well!

Foreign SIM roaming workaround

Quite interestingly, when someone roams on T-Mobile's unloved 2G network with a foreign-issued SIM, no artificial blocking of any kind gets applied! The most popular source of foreign SIMs for this trick is Mexican Telcel: there are some private sellers on Amazon who sell pre-activated Telcel SIM cards with already-assigned phone numbers, such that the prospective American user does not have to physically travel to Mexico, and there are English-language websites that allow top-up payments on these Mexican Telcel prepaid lines, eliminating the Spanish requirement.

There are some downsides with this method:

• You will have a Mexican number (country code 52), not USA. Convincing other people to call you at a Mexican number may be difficult, as they may be subject to international call charges.
• You will probably receive a steady flood of marketing SMS in Spanish, and it may be difficult to tell what is junk which you can simply delete vs potentially important communication from Telcel regarding your service.
• Telcel SIMs are made in the same triple-cut form factor as all other "modern" SIMs, thus mechanically weak in 2FF-only usage and thinner than the original 1FF/2FF/3FF standard, potentially resulting in less reliable contact.

Despite these limitations, however, this method is the most practical option available today for those who don't have a legacy T-Mobile account going back decades, or those who desire a SIM card which they can freely and safely move between different phones.

Small regional carriers

AT&T (former Cingular) and T-Mobile were the only two nationwide GSM operators in USA; with AT&T out of the picture since 2017, T-Mobile is the last one. However, there may be some small regional carriers in some corners of the country who still operate GSM/2G independently from TMO - finding these small carriers, if they exist, remains an active area of research.

American 2G Cooperative

A2GC is the non-profit company that created this Lemmy community. Our cooperative was founded as a response to the problems described earlier in this post, the very bleak state of GSM/2G services in USA today. Our cooperative seeks to do the following:

• Operate our own physical GSM/2G services in some very small select locations in USA. By small we mean just a handful of cell sites, an extremely tiny footprint - and our service locations will have to be very far away from civilization, in very remote rural areas with minimal population, as those areas are the only ones where we can get access to GSM spectrum bands.
• Operate a roaming-capable core network, and then use FCC rules section 20.12(d) to compel T-Mobile into letting us roam on them. The resulting effect we seek to achieve would be equivalent to roaming on TMO with a Mexican Telcel SIM (which works today), but with A2GC instead of Telcel as the home operator. The advantages will be USA phone numbers, SIM cards specifically made for retro mobile phones (2FF cut, traditional thickness) and 2G-centric customer service.

The above description is just a quick summary; a separate post will be made later to describe the mission and work of A2GC in greater detail.

Following advice of elders in the fediverse (meaning those who moved here from the evil site long before me), retromobilephones is a more fitting community name than gsm_phones_na for a proper long-term community - the poorly-named current one was essentially a refugee tent to house me during the most immediate phase of the crisis.

The new Retro Mobile Phones community is here: [email protected] - see you there!

For the purpose of this community, a retro cellular phone is one that requires a 1G, 2G or 3G network, as opposed to 4G or newer. Why would someone wish to use such a phone? Different people may have different reasons:

• Some people don't want any kind of smartphone: we want to use a plain mobile phone that makes and receives phone calls, and nothing more. We don't want a device that has a smartphone architecture inside, we want a traditional dumbphone from 1990s or early 2000s. Modern "dumbphones" are cheap imitations, while we want the real deal.
• Some people may be very loyal to specific brands or models of old phones. A person may have their favorite Ericsson or Nokia or Motorola phones, or any other brand of olde, and (we say) has a natural right to keep using them forever.
• Another type of person may be less partial to specific brands or models of old phones, but much more partial to the underlying cellular technology - for example, GSM. A retro-telecom engineer may have given years or even decades of his or her life to GSM (or D-AMPS TDMA or CDMA or iDEN) technology, and has a natural right (in our view) to live out the rest of his or her life enjoying said technology.

Different motivations, common interest

While different members of this community may have totally different personal reasons and motivations, we have one goal and interest in common: we want to keep our beloved phones working. Keeping retro mobile phones working means not only maintenance and repair on the phones themselves (including batteries), but also maintaining cellular network services for these phones to be functional, and providing our own replacements when traditional commercial carriers fail in their duty to do so.

Scope of this community

In the olden eras of interest to us, prior to today's LTE monoculture, different countries had different 1G, 2G and 3G cellular standards. The founder of this community (and author of this post) is based in USA (grew up here since age 15.5), hence my own knowledge and expertise is mostly Amero-centric. However, my own interest centers mostly around GSM technology, a form of 2G, and this particular technology originates from Europe, with North American version (with different frequencies, but otherwise identical) created as a follow-up. Therefore, I feel qualified to act as an expert on GSM globally, and not just in USA.

However, irrespective of the individual area of expertise of each given leader or moderator or subject matter expert, this community welcomes all users, devotees and appreciators of all 1G, 2G and 3G cellular technologies and of phones based on said technologies - no matter where you are on the globe, and no matter which specific 1G or 2G or 3G technology is of most interest to you.

Who runs this community

This community was created and is owned (top moderator role) by American 2G Cooperative. A2GC is a non-profit corporation in USA (legal entity details will be provided in a separate post) with a mission to build and operate a new GSM/2G cellular network in this country.

You are not required to live in USA or to be a member-patron of A2GC in order to participate in this Lemmy community - and vice-versa, when A2GC launches its core network and starts accepting dues-paying members who get GSM services in exchange for their membership dues, you will not be required to join this Lemmy community in order to sign up for A2GC membership and services. However, the present community and our company's services are intended for exactly the same target audience (except for the community being world-wide while A2GC is limited in scope to USA), hence it is our vision that the two will remain closely linked.

Other retro cellular technologies

While A2GC is focused on GSM/2G technology in USA, a truly diverse retro mobile phones community needs to include these other technologies too:

• 1G is an umbrella term for all analog technologies. In USA we had AMPS; internationally some other countries also used AMPS, while others had their own standards such as C-Netz and NMT.
• The successor to AMPS was D-AMPS, also called TDMA in USA. It is a digital technology in common with 2G, but because it was designed to coexist with AMPS, it is sometimes called 1.5G.
• In terms of pure 2G technologies, our beloved GSM existed in a state of fierce competition against CDMA and iDEN. Those competing 2G technologies have their own devotees, who are just as welcome in this community as us GSM queens.
• 3G successor to GSM is UMTS, while 3G successor to original 2G CDMA was/is CDMA2000.

While we as in A2GC are subject matter experts only in GSM, we warmly welcome devotees of all other 1G, 2G and 3G cellular technologies (and phones based on those technologies) into our community. Anyone who joins here as a subject matter expert for any of the non-GSM technologies will be officially recognized as such!

Stats say that this community has 80 subscribers, but 0 posts. How long has it been in existence?

I'll just go ahead and introduce myself then. I am a telecom professional on both day job and home hobby sides of my life. I am an old hag, born in 1979, and I have some strong disagreement with the direction in which both computing and telecom technologies have evolved in the past few decades. I am a retrotechnologist at heart, both retrocomputing and retro-telecom. (See my choice of home instance in the fediverse.)

Since this community is about telecom rather than computing, I'll skip my retrocomputing escapades in this introduction and go straight to retro-telecom stuff. I live in USA - I wasn't born here, but I've been living in this country since age 15.5, hence almost all of my telecom experience is Amero-centric. I did visit a phone company exchange in my little home town in Russia shortly before moving to USA, but at that age I really didn't understand much of anything that the host lady was showing me. (She was a telecom engineer at the exchange.)

I absolutely love TDM technology as in T1/E1 and everything adjacent. T1 is North American version which I learned first, E1 is European counterpart which I learned later. I originally learned T1, FT1 (fractional T1) and DDS (digital data service, 64 kbit/s or less) in the context of leased line Internet connections, and I also did a lot of work with North American SDSL technology (2B1Q, not the same as G.shdsl) in those days - I went as far as designing and building my own CSU/DSU for SDSL/2B1Q that could connect to SDSL services from North American ISPs and CLECs in the days when such services still existed. But then in my older years I developed a greater appreciation for T1/E1 technologies in their original native application, which is transport of digitized voice calls on TDM-based PSTN. Also in my older years I joined Osmocom and its closely associated retronetworking community, and developed a new-found appreciation for ISDN.

My current passion in telecom is retro-cellular technologies, particularly GSM, also known as 2G. I detest modern smartphones and refuse to own or use one, instead I like traditional cellular phone handsets from late 1990s into early 2000s. Those phones require a cellular network that puts out GSM signals, but in the present day all major carriers have either already shut down their 2G networks or are in the process of doing so. My solution: start my own cellular phone company specifically focused on GSM/2G! See this post of mine...

This post is addressed to one person in particular: the person who goes by _ITX_ on Reddit and is the founder of /r/vintagemobilephones community on that platform. As I write this post, I do not yet know exactly how I will bring it to Mr. ITX's eyes (gender inferred from this post) - our (A2GC) current tentative plan is to have one of our other corporate officers (who isn't me and should therefore not be subject to the site-wide ban that was imposed on me as a private individual) create an account on Reddit and either message modmail or make a regular post in VMP sub. But I am writing out my actual message to Mr. ITX here because it is the only way for me to convey it in my own words. If I were to send my words to another member of my team and have her (we are an all-female team at the moment) copy-n-paste them into Reddit, those ban-zealous admins could accuse us of ban evasion because it would still be my words getting onto their precious platform - but with my actual words existing only in cyberspace outside of Reddit and with my collaborator merely sharing a link, I don't see any potential for wrongdoing on our part.

Dear Mr. ITX and other moderators of /r/vintagemobilephones: I fucked up. I fucked up really, really bad, and I fully admit it. If you need or want to know the full sordid details, I detailed them here, but the short version is that I used my MotherMychaela account for two purposes at the same time: technical posts in your community and other similar technical communities, plus a separate and unrelated use of the same account for purely personal posts and comments, dealing with my struggles of living as a non-passing (visible) trans woman while simultaneously being a member of yet another marginalized group which I would rather not name.

My posts in those other communities - those dealing with transgender condition and my other marginalized aspect - were the ones where I ran afoul of Reddit site-wide rules by talking a little too frankly about the taboo subject of s____de, and on my 5th offense of said nature (which happened on May 30) my entire account got banned site-wide.

It is my understanding, based on your posts, that you (Mr. ITX) live in some European country where GSM/2G services still exist and are not in the process of being shut down. Furthermore, I recently saw a comment by you in which you agreed with the principal idea that GSM/2G cellular services should be kept around. Based on these observations, I hope you will agree that my company American 2G Cooperative is poised to provide a truly valuable service to the community of vintage GSM/2G mobile phone users who live in USA and currently suffer from T-Mobile's all-out war against 2G.

I also hope that as moderators of /r/vintagemobilephones, you will agree with me that my track record in your sub was spotless: I never came anywhere close to violating any of your rules, all technical content I posted was fully on-topic and very informative, and looking at vote counts on these posts of mine, it certainly looks like the wider community of /r/vintagemobilephones valued and appreciated my contributions. Thus I hope you will agree with me that it is extremely unfair for the entire community of GSM/2G vintage mobile phone users in USA to be deprived of communication with A2GC, the one company who can actually do something about the poor 2G situation in this country, just because I, a flawed and imperfect human being, made one big fuck-up.

If you agree with the general idea that your VMP community on Reddit and my company American 2G Cooperative should remain connected despite my personal flaws and imperfections, we need to figure out some way to make it work which Reddit site-wide admins won't be able to decry as ban evasion. I propose an arrangement where A2GC will designate another person (either one of our current corporate officers who isn't me, or a new hired staffer specifically for this purpose) who will represent A2GC in your subreddit. Since the ban which Reddit imposed on me applies to me as a private individual, while A2GC as a corporate entity never violated any rules, I don't see any legitimate basis for Reddit site-wide admins to object to another A2GC officer posting in VMP sub if you as subreddit admins welcome said content.

Another issue I would like to discuss is creation of a truly parallel vintage or retro mobile phones community in Lemmy fediverse. While I have yet to encounter anyone here who suffered exactly the same kind of ruination at the hands of Reddit site-wide admins as I did, I see many other people who have been burned by that mega-platform in myriad other ways, many of whom have (voluntarily?) left Reddit completely - saying things like "friends don't let friends use Reddit". Everyone here has been encouraging me to create a proper VMP or RMP community here in the fediverse, and I reason that I should heed those calls.

In my opinion, the best possible course of action would be if you, Mr. ITX, were to create a community named vintagemobilephones on any of the many available Lemmy instances in the fediverse. If you were to do so, there would be absolutely no question or doubt as to legitimacy of that new community, it would be officially as legitimate as the one on Reddit, and everyone would be free to participate on whichever platform they like, or whichever platform they are able to access without interference from self-appointed gods of final judgment. Alternatively, if you would officially bless me or someone else to create a community named vintagemobilephones here on Lemmy, and officially link to it from your subreddit in the same way how you currently link to the Discord, that option would also be equally good.

However, if you don't agree with doing any of the above, I shall respect your wishes and not infringe on your community name vintagemobilephones. In that case, I will probably name the new Lemmy community retromobilephones, as another commenter here suggested. (The present gsm_phones_na community is a temporary placeholder; think of it as an emergency refugee tent that houses me as a war refugee from Reddit.)

Also speaking of VMP Discord: I did not know of its existence until today. During my tenure on Reddit I only used the "old" web interface, which fails to show your Discord link and many other details. Today I used a private browsing window to look at your subreddit via "new" Reddit interface (without logging in), and I saw your Discord link. However, please tell people in that Discord that I am not able to participate after all. I created an account named A2GC-Mychaela and went through major rigamarole to get past account creation and verification, but I am still not able to actually look at content meaningfully or post anything. I don't know if it is because my Firefox browser is too old (which I cannot "upgrade"), or if my 1970s brain is too stupid or ossified to figure it out, but the end result is that I am not able to participate there - the platform is too hostile to this old broad. Please tell people there that my creation of that A2GC-Mychaela account was a mistake, and please feel free to delete it via your admin powers.

OK, I think I wrote everything I wanted to write - I wrote the above post over the course of several hours with breaks in between. Let me just close by asking you, Mr. ITX, to please give me some kind of response, even just an acknowledgement that you read my open letter to you. You can reply to me in any of the following ways:

1. If you already happen to have an account anywhere in Lemmy fediverse, or if you would be willing to create one, you can simply comment under this post.
2. If you would like to write to me privately through the same fediverse setup (using your existing account on some Lemmy instance or one which you would be willing to create), the same platform here allows private messages, and I welcome such.
3. You are always welcome to simply email me at [email protected], my official "work" email address. I realize that most people these days are unwilling to use direct email because they don't want to give out their "real" email address, likely tied to their IRL identity, to someone they don't trust. But if you don't have a Lemmy account anywhere, don't want to create one, and you don't want to use your real email address either, I implore you to please at least create a throwaway email address on some junk email service and use it to contact me.

Sincerely,
Mychaela Falconia,
a real human woman in San Diego, California, USA who seeks to make the world a better place for GSM/2G users.

P.S. Since you are based in EU rather than USA, I reason that such details will probably be completely uninteresting to you, but toward the bottom of my A2GC introductory post you can find complete details about our company, including our physical office address and government-issued ID numbers.

As I explained in previous posts, I am a refugee from Reddit, and this community is intended to be a refugee shelter for those whose beloved home country is /r/vintagemobilephones community on that big scary site. As explained in my last post, I was never banned by VMP subreddit mods, from what I can tell those mods were just as appreciative and supportive of my on-topic relevant content as the rest of that community - but Reddit site-wide admins inserted themselves as an insurmountable barrier between me and my native community.

So why did I not name this RetroLemmy community "vintagemobilephones" just like the one on Reddit? Answer: because neither I nor A2GC own that name. I am not the original founder of /r/vintagemobilephones, nor was I ever a member of its mod team - instead I was just a prominent technical contributor without any ownership stake. As of this writing, I do not yet have any way to contact any of the mods of that subreddit - hence I have no way of knowing if they even know what happened, and if they do, how they feel about it. Thus it would be wrong for me (or for A2GC as a company) to claim to be a successor to /r/vintagemobilephones on Reddit without having even spoken to any of the mods of the original community.

I thought about naming this community after A2GC, but then decided against it. A2GC seeks to become a small regional cellular operator in some of the more remote and rural locations in USA, and once we build out as such, we will stand on equals with AT&T, T-Mobile, Viaero Wireless, Union Telephone, GCI Alaska and so forth. It is clearly not appropriate to require a customer relation (or being a "customer in waiting", anxiously awaiting promised network build-out) for someone to be interested in Vintage Mobile Phones - hence the community needs a name that conveys a more expansive scope than just A2GC.

Then come some practical limits on my area of expertise. It is my understanding that anyone who creates a new community is expected to moderate it, and I do not feel qualified to moderate in areas that are outside of my expertise, both technical and geopolitical:

1. In technical terms, GSM is not the only "retro" cellular phone technology for which Vintage Mobile Phones were made - far from it. Just in terms of "2G" technologies alone, GSM fiercely competed with CDMA and iDEN in its heyday, then there are "1G" analog technologies such as AMPS, C-Netz and NMT, and then there is a "1.5G" transitional technology as in D-AMPS or "TDMA" as it was called in North America. All of these technologies have their own devotees, each of them is beloved to some people, and all of them were represented in the original Reddit community. Yet out of these technologies, the only one in which I consider myself an expert is GSM.
2. Why North America, why not just USA or in the opposite direction, the whole world? When it comes to Vintage Mobile Phones, different frequency bands were adopted by EU and USA, and then by other countries that followed these two different leads. All of Eurasia and many other parts of the world (with which I have very limited familiarity) eventually adopted GSM frequency bands that were originally defined/invented by some regulators somewhere in EU, while Federal Communications Commission in USA defined a different set of frequency bands for early cellular networks in USA. Canada and Mexico copied these frequency definitions from USA FCC, and thus all of North America became technologically harmonized when it comes to early (1G and 2G) cellular systems - but EU and most of the rest of the world harmonized on a different standard.

Newer phones, including late 2G era, were made triband or quadband, covering both geopolitical regions - but all early GSM/2G phones were made for one region only, either for EU-led world or for North America. While many of the same companies made "parallel" models for the two markets, differing only in frequency bands, once there are two different physical variants being made, other differences inevitably crept in. Hence Vintage GSM phones made for North American market constitute their own category, distinct from early GSM phones in EU.

Now on to practical matters: while I consider myself an expert only on North American GSM phones and not any other category of Vintage Mobile Phones, this community is a refuge for anyone who has been wronged by Reddit in one way or another, and anyone who would like to stand in fellowship with those of us wrongfully banned from that site. Therefore, if you would like to post some interesting content about Vintage Mobile Phone technologies other than GSM, or VMP topics or issues or concerns that exist geographically outside of North America, please feel welcome to post or comment! Maybe some day the original founders of /r/vintagemobilephones will create a properly blessed mirror community here, or maybe someone else will step in - but until then, please use this rule of thumb: anything that would be welcome in /r/vintagemobilephones on Reddit is also welcome here.

If you haven't seen it already, please read my introductory post about American 2G Cooperative - then come back here.

As my linked post says, I currently serve as President and CTO of A2GC - but this non-profit corporation was only formed in the spring of 2025. What was I doing previously? Answer: for many years (going back to 2013) I led a project named FreeCalypso, seeking to design and build my own phone handset based on GSM/2G technology and TI Calypso chipset. That project has its home page, but that page had its last update in 2023 and is now due for more updates...

Back in 2018 there was a now-defunct project named ZeroPhone - another person, completely unrelated to me, designed a DIY smartphone in which an off-the-shelf GSM modem module from SimCom was controlled by a Raspberry Pi Zero, with the latter component implementing and controlling the phone UI. Those SimCom GSM modules used by ZP project were proprietary, while my FreeCalypso solution was the only available GSM modem whose firmware source code is fully published. So I got in touch with ZeroPhone main developer and engaged in a dialogue toward building a ZP+FC variant - but that original ZP developer then lost interest (not just in FC, but in his own project too), and ZeroPhone project went defunct.

In its heyday, ZeroPhone had its own Reddit community, and in December of 2018 I joined Reddit specifically so I could engage with that community. I named my Reddit account MotherMychaela: Mychaela is my actual first name (yes, it appears on my California driver's license), and Mother is the title by which I went in my own then-active FreeCalypso community.

But then the unexpected happened. When I joined Reddit in December of 2018, I did it with the express intent of participating in that ZeroPhone community, and didn't have any other uses or activities in mind. But when I went to create that MotherMychaela account, Reddit somehow psychically learned that I am a trans woman (physical fact, irrelevant to my work with cellular phone technologies, but a fact nonetheless), and recommend a bunch of transgender-related subreddits to me. I joined those subs, thinking "why not".

After that beginning in December of 2018, ZeroPhone project very quickly went dead, but all those other subs I joined (TG-related) naturally remained quite active - so I started participating in them, commenting from my lived experience. And thus between that time in late 2018 or early 2019 and the end of my Reddit tenure on 2026 May 30, I used that MotherMychaela account to make posts or comments of two different kinds:

1. Posts and comments related to my technical work: FreeCalypso GSM MS project, Osmocom Cellular Network Infrastructure, Themyscira Wireless CN software and eventually A2GC.
2. Posts and comments of a more personal nature, primarily in transgender-related subreddits and some other subs dealing with my marginalized minority status.

None of my posts or comments in category 1 per above breakdown ever broke any rules, subreddit or site-wide, and I was never subject to any adverse moderation actions (or adverse actions from site-wide admins) in any of the technical subs I participated in, including the principal one /r/vintagemobilephones. However, when crimes against humanity occurred beginning in 2020-March and then continuing for two years or so, my once-beloved LGBTQ+ community took the wrong side in those events - and while I continued engaging with TG community on Reddit due to the unchangeable physical fact that I am a post-op trans woman and thus have a lot of interest in common with the larger TG community, my interactions with them became a lot more tense.

My interactions with transgender community in the post-Covid era earned me some subreddit bans - but those subs were all TG-related or otherwise personal-type, not technical, hence my ability to do high-quality technical work and post about it in technical subs was unimpeded. But on the more personal side of my life, as a result from having been banned from the more mainstream TG subs, I felt forced to seek out and participate in more marginalized ones. Those marginalized subs have much less aggressive subreddit-level moderators, at which point I met a new enemy: Reddit site-wide admins.

It also needs to be understood that the more marginalized, less mainstream TG-related subs on Reddit attract those trans women (as well as trans men and non-binary folks) who have a lot of trauma, stemming from inability to pass, "failed" transitions, getting worn down by being the target of intense transphobia on a daily basis - hence the mood in those subs is often dark. In that atmosphere, every now and then someone will post musings about a certain unmentionable act that is widely associated with a certain number that reads as 41%.

As it happens, I am pro-choice: not only with regard to abortion, but also with regard to that other issue. Between 2023 and 2026, a total of 5 comments of mine got "[ Removed by Reddit ]" as they say it - I had to dig through my still-visible (to me only) account history to count them. Every single one of those 5 instances were in personal-type subs, either transgender-related or related to another marginalized minority I am a part of - never in any of the technical subs in which I participated with stellar reputation.

Unfortunately my fifth offense before Reddit site-wide admins (or rather their AI algorithms - the suspensions in reaction to my comments were far too immediate to be done by any human moderator or admin) moved that AI-powered behemoth to ban (or "permanently suspend", as they say it) my entire Reddit account. And from what I read online regarding new accounts in such circumstances, it is basically an impossible task if the objective is to maintain a continued identity and presence in those subs in which I was always fully welcome without any trouble.

I fully admit that I fucked up: I showed my last fateful comment (the one that triggered the last and final ban) to a non-autistic member of my family, and she told me in no uncertain terms that what I said was not appropriate for any public platform. My Aspie brain meant absolutely no harmful intent with that comment, absolutely no intent to harm anyone, violently or otherwise, but I was told (after the fact) that mainstream society's norms say otherwise.

However, I argue that the punishment meted out to me by Reddit site-wide admins was and is not appropriate to the crime. It might have been proper to ban me from all personal-type communities or subreddits, such that I can never again post anything on their platform of a personal nature, while leaving my ability to make purely technical posts purely for work-related purposes, strictly related to my job of building a new GSM/2G cellular network that is highly desired by /r/vintagemobilephones community in which I never had any negative interactions - but Reddit site-wide bans don't work this way, instead they block my ability to post in those subs where the resident communities were nothing but appreciative of my content.

Going forward, this new account I created on RetroLemmy in the fediverse shall be strictly "bonnet on": aside from the present post and any clarifying replies, I intend to post only in conjunction with my official role as CTO of American 2G Cooperative, only technical or business-related content that relates to our mission of building a new GSM network and providing working service to those who wish to use 20 year old Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson etc phones.

As for the original /r/vintagemobilephones community on Reddit, the best scenario would be if high-ranking members of that community (mods or otherwise) discover on their own this new A2GC online presence in the fediverse, and on their own initiative inform the rest of that community as to what happened. It would also be ideal if some other member of VMP community, someone who is not subject to a Reddit ban, were to join this Lemmy community and act as a human bridge between the two communities, cross-posting important valuable content back and forth. Alternatively, if no existing member of VMP on Reddit feels up to the task of serving as this human bridge, but someone else with an interest in Vintage Mobile Phones (and 2G cellular services to make them work) finds this post - if you are not banned from Reddit, I and the rest of A2GC team strongly implore you to join both /r/vintagemobilephones and this Lemmy community and start bridging content.

We as in A2GC are also exploring the possibility of having other A2GC corporate officers create Reddit accounts and post in /r/vintagemobilephones. As I understand it, Reddit site-wide ban applies against me as an individual human - and while they won't carve out an exception for me posting solely in my job role, A2GC as a corporate entity has not committed any Reddit rule violations. Thus if a different A2GC corporate officer creates a Reddit account and posts A2GC content in a subreddit where such content is fully welcome, can they still call it ban evasion? It is an avenue which we are still exploring.

American 2G Cooperative is a start-up non-profit cellular phone company in USA, and I (Mychaela N. Falconia) am one of its founders, currently serving as President & CTO. We seek to build a new GSM cellular network in our great country, a specialty network specifically designed to serve the needs of Vintage Mobile Phone users who reside here. The network we seek to build shall consist of the following components:

1. Physical GSM services in those small select locations where we can obtain the necessary spectrum. There are a few select locations with PCS1900 spectrum vacancies, and there is a much larger set of locations (albeit still rural and remote) with available GSM850 spectrum.
2. Roaming-capable core network. At the present time the very unloved GSM/2G network of T-Mobile USA is still up in many places, but they artificially block access to it for their own native users and for users of TMO-parented MVNOs. Yet users of SIM cards issued by foreign operators (e.g., Mexican Telcel) who roam on TMO experience much higher quality of service, without any artificial blocking! When A2GC becomes a physical GSM operator in some little remote corner of rural America, operating under a license from FCC, we'll be able to use FCC rules section 20.12(d) to compel TMO into letting us roam on their network, with the same level of roaming service which they provide to foreign SIM cards.

A lot of information about A2GC and progress of our work toward the goals listed above has previously been posted in /r/vintagemobilephones community on Reddit. However, our team's ability to post in that forum has recently been disrupted by hostile actions on the part of Reddit site-wide admins, necessitating the present refugee-mode migration to Lemmy. Just to be clear, VMP community on Reddit loved our content, it always got significant upvotes, and we can only assume that VMP mod team welcomed our contributions as well - but Reddit site-wide admins got in the way and thereby made life worse for all GSM/2G users in North America, blocking communication between the new 2G-serving cellular phone company and its base of would-be service subscribers.

Over the coming weeks and months we are going to post more content here, eventually recreating the full repository of knowledge that once resided in VMP community on Reddit. However, let me close this post with some important legal and contact information.

A2GC is a non-profit corporation seeking federal tax-exempt status under Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(12) as a mutual or cooperative telephone company (please note it is a different type of tax-exempt non-profit entity from the usual 501(c)(3) - see IRS publication 557), and like all tax-exempt non-profit entities, we are required to publicly disclose our management structure, bylaws, financial details and so forth. While our website is still under construction, the key basics are as follows:

We are a Delaware corporation, our incorporation file number with the state of DE is 10180871, and our federal EIN is 33-4896531. Our physical office address is 16870 West Bernardo Drive, Suite 400, San Diego, CA 92127 - however, because we don't employ any full-time staff, only part-time volunteers, in-person meetings at our office location are available only by appointment. Contact details for our current corporate officers are as follows:

Ms. Mychaela Falconia, President & CTO: [email protected]
Ms. Jessica Westerman, Secretary: [email protected]
Ms. Shannon Hogan, Treasurer: [email protected]

We sincerely apologize to our users-in-waiting for having to take this detour, i.e., for having to take a break from our actual work of building our new GSM cellular network and spend time and energy on Reddit-to-Lemmy migration instead - but those Reddit site-wide admins forced our hand by blocking our ability to post in the original community. Please stay tuned for more technical and network-operational content that will be posted here shortly.