> Terrestrial cellular towers cost between $150k to $500k per tower
I'd be interested to find out exactly where this cost exists. I would expect the majority of the cost (especially in rural/mountainous areas) to be more with power and backhaul, rather than the physical radio gear. Because it's rural, you should be able to easily just use coverage bands (ie 850 MHz or 900 MHz) with relatively high transmission power. This would easily be able to cover 300 km2.
Because of the higher transmission power, and the fact that the tower would be in the middle of nowhere, wouldn't the OPEX be higher, with smaller numbers for CAPEX?
A lot of the cost is regulatory. I used to work at a mobile provider, and it took months to get permission from all the various government agencies before we could actually start building. Even if the tower is in BFE, you still have to get all your plots to the FCC, you need EPA signoff for batteries and fuel tanks and such. Plus there's always state and local permits of various kinds. We had a custom workflow application just to track all of that and there were dozens of steps.
Cell towers aren't very expensive on an ongoing basis, but every few years you're rolling out the next big technology (we went from analog to 1x to 3g to LTE while I was there) and it's a headache.
Can I be devils advocate and say I think this is two years too late on Motorola's side?
Samsung has a great offer with their Galaxy Enterprise Edition phones. Phones with 5 year warranty. 7 years of software updates.
Motorola, welcome! I wish you did this before I bought my last Samsung phone. That being said, if you can keep this up till my current phone needs replacing, you will have a customer in me, guaranteed.
My Lenovo experience has surpassed that of any other computer hardware brand.
It's not too late, Samsung is one of the most closed Android OEMs and they're going in the wrong direction. They just removed most of the recovery menu. [1]
Google is dead set on taking away our right to run software of our choice on devices that we own. I think if Motorola plays their cards right they could take the geeky enthusiast market by storm, and that's going to snowball into recommendations to friends and family, and eventually - corporate.
This could be the reality in the near future: Do you want to keep using ReVanced? Motorola. Do you want to install a custom OS? Motorola. Do you want privacy? Motorola.
However I think that Google could decide to sabotage them by forcing them to implement their user-hostile agenda, if I remember correctly there are conditions that OEMs must meet to be allowed access to Play Services/Play Store?
Google could refuse unless Motorola/GrapheneOS enforce developers ID verification and effectively give Google unilateral control over what type of software is allowed to run on our devices.
GrapheneOS currently doesn't ship Play Store or Services OOTB. They install as normal apps (albeit with GrapheneOS providing support code to make the fact that these things use/expose custom privileged APIs work correctly). I don't know if the Google TOS would prohibit that, at least I am not aware of any enforcement action against GrapheneOS in this regard. GrapheneOS also doesn't have Google's blessing, meaning some apps like Google Pay won't work on it. To get this, you need to apply to be an OEM.
Really Motorola doesn't need to sell a GOS phone. Motorola just need to sell a phone with the right hardware security features, open source/upstream their Android/Linux patches, and give users the ability to run GOS.
Hopefully they can then give you the option to buy one with GOS preinstalled, but even if they don't. It will be sufficient that it can run GOS.
Unlike Windows, nobody feels they're paying an inherent tax when buying a stock Android phone. I'm sure nobody will mind.
The hard part will be actually supporting the phone for long enough.
GOS is reliant on Google's open sourced Pixel android releases up to and including the 9 series. This is because GOS doesn't have the resources to handle that entire side of things. But I guess part of that is also that GOS doesn't have access to the necessary information to do that stuff properly either.
That's fair, this would still be a valuable development even if Motorola doesn't end up shipping devices with GrapheneOS preinstalled, but if they did I think there's a lot of potential for them to enter the mainstream. A device with GrapheneOS without any [major] caveats (like Play Integrity API, Google Pay not working) would be a game changer.
I can't see such a GrapheneOS existing without explicit Google support. And I don't think Google would support something like that unless they suddenly decided to actually not be evil again.
I 100% agree. It should have just happened 12 or 24 months ago. It's not too late, and there is a chance to capture some market, but it is late. If Motorola did this last year, I think they could have captured 10-20% market share. Their share will be reduced because the people who did care for long term updates have upgraded. Now they get 4+ years of updates because of Android. https://security.samsungmobile.com/workScope.smsb
This is a power move on Motorola's side, and I'm here for it.
There are conditions for OEM's installing any of the Google services. Although, so far it seems that graphene have been able to work around them (although, this is not a world I traverse).
I don't think the standard Android user wants to install ReVanced. They don't care about custom OS's. They want support and updates.
I remember the dark times where you purchased hardware, and you would be lucky to get 4 years of updates.
Motorola/Lenovo are late to this game. Two years ago, people updated to phones with phones that would get monthly security updates for five years. This was new to the Android ecosystem two years ago (with the exception of maybe a few Pixel phones).
In fact Motorola did the opposite: they recently announced that in their opinion they found a loophole in the EU ecodesign regulation that they will exploit in order to not provide updates for some of their cheaper phone models.
After that, why would anyone trust any of their promises for other models?
I looked into this and it seems like Motorola is coming up with a contrived interpretation of the ecodesign regulation (EU reg. 2023/1670, annex II, "Design for reliability").
Specifically they seem to be interpreting this to mean that they only need to make the update available (i.e. downloadable) for 5 years iff they release an update.
> (a) from the date of end of placement on the market to at least 5 years after that date, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall, if they provide security updates, corrective updates or functionality updates to an operating system, make such updates available at no cost for all units of a product model with the same operating system;
However recital 7 makes the intent crystal clear:
> It is currently not possible, or extremely difficult, for the owners of mobile phones, including smartphones, and tablets to change the operating system of their device, which is chosen and maintained by the manufacturer through regular updates. Such updates generally lead to the establishment of a range of major and minor versions. Updates may be used to ensure the continued security of a device, to correct errors in the operating system or to offer new functionalities to users. They may be offered voluntarily or might be required to be offered by Union law.
> In order to improve the reliability of devices, therefore, it needs to be ensured that users keep receiving such updates for a minimum period of time and at no cost, including for a period after the manufacturer stops selling the relevant product model. Such updates should be offered either as updates to the latest available operating system version that has to be installable on the device, or as updates to the operating system version that was installed on the product model at the moment of the end of placement on the market, or subsequent versions.
They're not getting any points for this, it's anti-consumer and makes a mockery of the law, but I don't think it's an actual loophole and they'll be punished for it if they don't comply.
However all other OEMs are acting equally poorly in other areas so this really shouldn't be the reason for anyone to pass on GOS-powered Motorola devices, especially since this is the one area that's ~guaranteed to be completely different in partnership with GrapheneOS.
Motorola Signature (2026) has 7 years of support. It's a subset of Motorola's future devices in 2027 and later which are going to support GrapheneOS since the current ones in 2026 didn't quite meet all of the requirements yet. The intent has never been to support their existing devices but rather for future devices to provide everything needed and official GrapheneOS support. There's a lot of work to do. Meeting all of our requirements on low-end devices is currently unrealistic but can be a goal further down the road.
For what it's worth, TigerData is the company that develops TimescaleDB, a very popular and performant time series database provided as a Postgres extension. I'm surprised that the fact that TigerData is behind it is not mentioned anywhere in the blog post. (Though, TimescaleDB is mentioned 14 times on the page).
Yes, but that would then require more infrastructure. For example, Australia does not have a national ID card - or a national proof of age card (each state, however, does implement a Proof of Age card, eg https://www.nsw.gov.au/driving-boating-and-transport/driver-...).
So, what is your zero knowledge based on? Who is the signer?
Under the Identity Verification Services Act 2023 we have IDMatch (https://www.idmatch.gov.au/). This whole setup can simply be extended to have third parties act as an intermediary between the government and the party attempting to get proof of age. Similar to AusPost's DigitaliD (https://www.digitalid.com/personal). But let's not have that company owned by the Government :)
It's pretty cooked that we are asking the social media companies to go ahead and prove to the eSaftey commissioner that they have measures in place to stop kids from getting access to social websites, yet they have to use unreliable measures like selfies to do it. The companies can't win here. This won't be the last you hear of this. https://youtu.be/YTwBStZIawY?t=306
Can't you just put a middle man on there then? Get a non-profit organisation like Mozilla to ask the govt. on behalf of the user.
The organisation asks the govt, and gives back a signed token.
The the only thing the government knows is that an age verification was requested. Once verification has been done once for one site, it can be used for future verifications.
The middle man in this scenario can mask the URL that is requesting age verification, but what's to stop the government compelling traffic logs from the middle man?
Nothing more than what prevents them from getting logs from your ISP about the sites you visit after verification. In ideal countries they need a court order for that, in less ideal ones they just scoop up the logs preemptively.
I'd be interested to find out exactly where this cost exists. I would expect the majority of the cost (especially in rural/mountainous areas) to be more with power and backhaul, rather than the physical radio gear. Because it's rural, you should be able to easily just use coverage bands (ie 850 MHz or 900 MHz) with relatively high transmission power. This would easily be able to cover 300 km2.
Because of the higher transmission power, and the fact that the tower would be in the middle of nowhere, wouldn't the OPEX be higher, with smaller numbers for CAPEX?
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