Originally Posted by jchamier:
“Australia is in process of shutting down 2G on their 3 networks, Telstra (biggest) has switched off, Optus is 1st of April 17, and Vodafone is 30 Sept 2017. AT&T in the US started turning off their 2G network on 31st Dec 2016. Singapore is shutting down by end April 2017.
I can see this being done carefully and slowly, as there are people (especially in corporates) using very old phones (think iPhone 3GS / Samsung Galaxy S3) that use tiny amounts of data but don't support 3G900. Vodafone is the only one talking about 3G switch off, by end 2020, and so they will be watching how many handsets. I don't think O2 has said anything.
Capacity moves are a different thing.”
From what I've seen online, the Galaxy S3 does support 900MHz 3G. Don't know about the S or S2 though.
The iPhone 3G and 3GS does not support 3G900, though how many people are still using old 3GS' that have pretty much zero app support on a very old OS?
Shutting down 2G would make basic, non-3G phones obsolete, as well as smartphones that do not support 3G (like the iPhone 2G); however, switching off 3G (which is what Vodafone wants to do by the end of 2020) would make any non-4G phone into a basic phone with pretty much zero data access unless using Wi-Fi (there won't be any GPRS sites then but EDGE is still painfully slow unless for really basic stuff). And there's also a lot of non-VoLTE devices which would be shunted onto 2G for the calls, thus congesting up whatever small amount of 2G capacity Vodafone still has switched on.
Maybe this is why Vodafone aren't keen on refarming their 1800MHz spectrum (unlike O2), so that they can keep the 5MHz 1800 for 2G to compliment the small amount of 900MHz 2G for calls on non-VoLTE devices?