"new phones" seems pretty unspecified and also likely be outdated in some years. If there was a field like that, I guess it should be more specific.
Have you tried asking in some osm community?
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
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Forced Obsolescence / Obsolescence by Design
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Chatter about forced obsolescence, including but not limited to:
- salvaging or repurposing abandoned / unsupported hardware
- name and shame culprits of obsolescence
- right to repair guidance and advocacy in situations involving obsolescence
- obtaining old software to drive old hardware, finding archives, building old binaries from source
related communities (decentralized only)
somewhat related to forced obsolescence:
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- !righttorepair@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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Maybe mark it a compose of 2G/3G/LTE/NR, such as LTE only/3G+LTE/LTE+NR.
But there is another issue: the cell tower is belong to different MNO, so for some MNO you get 3G+LTE but for another MNO you get LTE.
I think OP is talking about WiFi with entry barriers in this case
Ok. Mark it as Open/OWE/WPA/WPA2/WPA3/802.1X. The main reason prevent old phone connect is WPA version. The newer WPA version require newer hardware and software.
Check the OP. it's about login portals.
Indeed GSM is irrelevant because GSM towers cannot relate to any particular business. GSM standards are much less of a problem. When the country decides to abandon LTE, all non-5G phone owners are fucked nationwide.
It’s a Wi-Fi problem. Captive portals are the biggest problem, and the most obnoxious problem because it’s an artificially created problem as a consequence of incompetence. I only had captive portals in mind when writing the OP, but there are also situations where someone configures an AP to not use 802.11b (for example) and then old hardware does not even see the SSID. My laptop cannot connect at some public libraries for this reason. Then WPA versions /could/ be an issue, I think, but I have not encountered that.
Yeah, it would not be trivial to establish a thorough criteria that covers all variables which mappers would then pay attention to. It would be more sensible to simply have a flag that says “dysfunctional for old phones” and if any device cannot connect due to being too old, it should be sufficient to set the flag.
There are countless ways incompetent IT folks can fuck up Internet service for the general public. It would be unsurmountable to catalog all such foolish/elitist implementations. But some of the info can be automated. A mapper who is at a location could run a tool that does a wifi scan. The mapper could select the relevant SSID for the establishment, and some basic info could be captured just from that: WEP/WPA/open.. and if open then presence of a captive portal could be auto detected.
If such an tool were made to improve maps, it could also double as enriching a DB for navigation use (for those who navigate offline and/or refuse Google location tracking).
Have you tried asking in some osm community?
No. Thanks for reminding me. I was planning to crosspost there.
Captive portals have existed for ages, I dont know of any that check phone age, can you share an example?
Captive portals could check the age of the phone by looking at the user agent string in the HTTP headers. I’m not sure how often that happens, but at several cafes my AOS 5 device would detect a captive portal and then simply render a giant red padlock that covers the screen.
Certainly a majority of the DoS I experience is simply a broken captive portal. The browser renders fewer objects than intended by the web devs, who recklessly assume all browsers are bleeding edge latest that can handle whatever coding frills they deploy. E.g. the screen might say something like “click ‘agree’ to gain access”, but then there is no button, tickbox, or object labeled ‘agree’. A bus or train captive portal will render a nice looking travel-related landscape image, and nothing else. No text. No buttons. Just an image. People with fancy phones would of course get some kind of object they can interact with. One supplier presents an agreement tickbox, but tapping on the box does not cause the box to tick.
I’m not sure what the red padlocks are about. Maybe the devs know they created a discriminatory shitshow, and they choose the dress up the dysfunctionality by detecting browser age and throw up a red padlock instead of trying.