NEW YORK — When Adele Rothman bought her 16-year-old son a car in 2003, she made sure to pick one that had OnStar, the onboard communications and safety system.
What the Scarsdale, N.Y., resident didn't know was that the OnStar system in the car was already doomed to die. The federal government decided in 2002 to let cellular carriers shut down analog cell-phone networks, used by Rothman's Saab and about 500,000 other OnStar-equipped cars, after Feb. 18, 2008.
Analog systems have been mostly replaced by digital wireless networks that generally provide greater call clarity, capacity and features.
It's the end of the nationwide network that launched the U.S. wireless industry 24 years ago, and it leaves a surprising number of users like Adele Rothman in the lurch.
OnStar told Rothman in March that its service would stop at the end of this year, in anticipation of the network shutdown in February. "I was really upset," she said, "because that was my tieline" to her son.
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Perhaps a million cell phones will lose service, but those are cheap and easy to replace. The effects will be felt the most by people who have things that aren't phones but have built-in wireless capabilities, like OnStar cars and home alarm systems.
The shutdown date has been known years in advance, but some industries appear to have a had a problem updating their technologies and informing their customers in advance. That raises the question of whether the effects will be even more widespread the next time a network is turned off, given the proliferation of wireless technology.
General Motors Corp., which owns OnStar, started modifying its cars after the 2002 decision by the Federal Communications Commission to let the network die. But some cars made as late as 2005 can't use digital networks for OnStar, nor can they be upgraded. For some cars made in the intervening years, GM provides digital upgrades for $15.
In 2006, OnStar said it had let customers know of the shutdown with a posting on its Web site. This year, it said it had notified all affected customers. Spokeswoman Cristi Chojnacki said she was unable to comment beyond those statements.
General Motors and other car manufacturers with similar systems, including Daimler AG's Mercedes-Benz, are facing a potential class-action lawsuit over the analog shutdown.
When Rothman complained, GM sent a $500 coupon toward the purchase of a new car. To compensate for the lack of OnStar, she outfitted her son's car with a hands-free system and a Global Positioning System.
A week before the end-of-year shutdown, the analog coverage map is still the first one presented on OnStar's Web site. The digital coverage map, showing large areas of "limited" service in out-of-the-way places, is available on another page.
On the home-alarm side, about 400,000 systems still use analog service, according to Lou Fiore, chairman of the Alarm Industry Communications Committee. In most of those systems, the wireless link to the alarm center is a backup to the landline. But some homes lack a land line, so the wireless link is the only connection to the outside world.
Fiore doesn't know the current number of systems that use only analog wireless connections and no land line, but a survey by the AICC a few years ago put the number at 138,000.
"The larger (alarm) companies are in pretty good shape," Fiore said. "There are so many smaller companies out there that are probably, I'd say, in denial. They just don't know about it."
To complicate things, some alarm systems advertised as "digital" actually use a digital subchannel of the analog network. True digital alarm-system modems did not become available until 2006, according to the AICC.
According to the Federal Communications Commission, many analog alarms that have not been replaced by the time the network is shut down will start beeping to warn that they've lost the connection to the alarm center.
The Central Station Alarm Association, an alarm industry group and the parent of the AICC, tried to get the FCC to delay the analog sunset.
The FCC turned away that request this year, saying digital networks are a much better use of the airwaves. The same spectrum can carry about 16 times as much traffic using digital technology compared to analog.
Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc. and Alltel Corp. are the largest carriers that still have analog networks. Alltel will take more time than Verizon and AT&T to close its network, shutting down in three stages ending in September. Each carrier will keep its portion of the newly available spectrum, and will use it to boost its digital services.
Affected devices
Carriers will start shutting down the country's oldest cellular network, for analog devices, in February.
Here's how to know if you will be affected:
Cell phones
If your phone is less than five years old, or has features like texting, Internet access or a built-in camera, it's not analog. An unknown number of analog handsets are still in use. Carriers say it's less than 1 percent of all U.S. cell phones, but that could still mean a million phones.
The main carriers with analog service are AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless and Alltel.
Car communication systems
Generally, cars from the 2003 model year and older with OnStar from General Motors Corp., TeleAid from Mercedes-Benz or Lexus Link are affected, and most won't be upgradable. Upgrade kits are available for most OnStar systems from model years 2004 and 2005.
Class-action lawsuits, consolidated in federal court in Detroit, are seeking compensation for the lowered value of the more than 500,000 affected cars with OnStar, plus about 200,000 with other systems.
Home alarms
Affected are burglar and fire alarms that use the analog wireless network as a sole or backup link between the home and an alarm center. Alarm systems using digital wireless links became available in 2006.