I am not sure I understand why you would say that, perhaps you could explain why you believe that to be an issue. While standards are changed regularly in an effort to make new beacons better and more reliable, there is no plan to change the standards for 406 MHz beacons in any manner that is not 100% backwards compatible and current plans look out way beyond the useful life of any PLB or EPIRB bought today. For commercial beacons such as SPOT, there may be questions that arise more on the order of is the company going to be around, but still not anything I would worry a lot about.