OnStar Going Dark For Half a Million Users

Stories about how OnStar, General Motors' cellular-based system for communicating with emergency and other helpful services while in your automobile, are legion. Nearly every user praises how it has gotten them out of one jam or another, usually after an accident.

Those days will be coming to a close for many, collateral damage victims in the shift from analog cell phones to digital ones, which arrives in January 2008: That's when the FCC will finally allow the last analog cellular services to be discontinued.

Analog cell phone service dates back to the original cellular services set up in the 1980s. Quality was exceptionally poor, but analog towers were set up around the country, blanketing the whole nation. If you're one of the few people who still own an analog phone (only 1 percent of cell phone users do), you can probably get a signal anywhere in the country, while your digital-toting friends (with their data services, music phones, TV broadcasts, and SMS) may have dead zones here and there.

It's the wide coverage of analog that probably prompted GM to use it in its cars instead of digital, but that doesn't explain why, when in 2002 the FCC announced that it would allow the analog networks to be dismantled, GM continued to put analog radios into cars as recently as 2005. New OnStar-ready cars have dual digital/analog radios, and some of the analog OnStar systems can be upgraded (the fee is a mere $15), but half a million cars will simply find their OnStar services turned off: GM says they can't be upgraded at all.

Why not? GM hasn't said.

Got an OnStar car that can't be upgraded? What was the company's explanation when you asked them why? Sound off in the comments section!