BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year BT has updated the schedule to phase out 3G services from its networks a little later than planned, saying this will now start early next year. Britain’s former state-owned telecoms operator says the EE mobile division will commence a nationwide 3G switch off in January 2024 and plans to complete the process by March, but is …
Where I live it's not unusual for the 4G to barely register one or two bars, and then the phone to default to 3G, which is pretty shit, but will carry some data.
With 3G being retired will I now be left with no data? Or will the retirement only be done once the Telco is confident that 4G service is in place?
I think I know the answer to that last one, and I'm not comforted, but thought I'd ask the more knowledgeable amongst you.
I was planning to write almost the same thing. We have 4G in our area but quite a number of places only get 3G. In my home, I can get 4G upstairs but am grateful we have wifi calling downstairs. I help run a few periodic drop in IT support cafes for the older generation and we use 4G wifi units for those bringing in laptops (that started because council run premises like schools and libraries, whilst having wifi, have it so restricted that we can't access many of the sites needed). We try to use places that have a 4G signal, but getting one that manages more than 5Mbs is rare.
Losing 3G sounds as though it will be a problem but, when anything drops back to it, it rarely seems able to deliver data at a usable rate - so I doubt we'll be any worse off. If the switch-off means an improvement in 4G, it will be a bonus. As for 5G, the nearest I've found that has been 30 miles away.
My experience with 5G is that it tends to perform worse than 4G. When I'm in the city if there's a 5G signal then my phone would use it but either it struggles because of the built-up environment and/or under-provision versus over use. I get better performance from rural 4G than urban 5G, but of course YMMV
5G *can* be shorter range than 4G. It depends on the frequency and power of the cell. 5G frequency bands are mostly a superset of 4G frequency bands, which in turn are a superset of 3G bands. If you decom a 3G or 4G network and reuse the band with 5G kit, with all else being equal, range should be similar.
If you're talking about the newly introduced 5G UWB bands, which all operate up on the K, Ka, and V bands, then yes, those are all going to be really short range.
Three in Durham City (with major university) is a complete joke - large areas in the middle have no or virtually no signal, and those that do have a signal get virtually no data traffic.
I'll be switching when my contract runs out (though I suspect they're all as bad, as this isn't 'down south').
Three are the same joke in my location which is a densely populated South London borough (postcode CR0), so their garbage network is by no means limited to "oop North".
4G data download speed on Three is measured in tens of kbps, sometimes single digit kbps, while the upload speed cannot be measured at all - it errors out. 3G is the same.
I put up with it for years (complained, but they refused to acknowledge they even had a problem - neighbours with different phones had the same issues with Three) as I had contracts on Three that used their femtocell in a location that no network covered at the time, but when Three turned off their femtocells a month after I had renewed for another 12 months I was left to count down the days until I could bin all the Three contracts, particularly as O2 coverage recently appeared in the location of the now ex-femtocell.
I'm now with Sky, which runs on top of O2, and it's night and day. And cheaper.
Avoid Three like the plague.
I'd be careful about going to O2. I've just left them because although reception was good pretty much everywhere, they have such low backhaul availability that that reception is next to useless in any built up areas. In Plymouth city centre it would show as having full 4G reception but if you tired to use it, it would not work at all. Even trying to view a simple text web page would take minutes to download and often not work at all.
The usable bandwidth would come in spurts. So it wouldn't work at all, then suddenly you'd get a couple of minutes of slow, but working data and then it would be gone again. All whilst having full 4G reception.
I found this to be the same anywhere there were more than a handful of people around. I guess it may be different in London, but in any built up area outside of there I found it to be next to useless.
BT and NOT 02
This is still confusing, work phons due to transmitter location have been BT Cellnet, then changed name to O2, now BT keep on about EE.
Had the call, do you want a BT mobile?
Got one already as on O2.
Not us.
BT Cellnet.
Oh.
Was at hospital today, no reception, had to use WiFi
Three are the same joke everywhere. I put up with their ABYSMAL coverage (I'm in London) and excuses for years (typical story with any subscription), I finally had enough when they hiked their pricing x 3, and I moved to 1p. I was not happy to do that, because 1p, a few years ago, tried to increase their profit using a few dirty tricks, but I think they got beaten up with a (soft) club by the regulators. I pay 36 quid yearly for unlimited calls, including free roaming in the EU, and they piggyback off EE, so it's not bad. The only thing they are horrible about is data, give you 250Mb free per month. But then I don't watch youtube and stupid (always) tiktok videos when I'm out and about so this 250Mb is actually enough for me to check emails and internet radio. But yeah, my children suffer from this 'chokehold ;)
As to Three... without obscenities, I simply wish them all the worst.
I find anywhere near any university tends to have poor data. Large density of students who generally will have everything switched on all of the time, various social media apps swamping the local available bandwidth. The university WiFi coverage isn't designed to cover the outside of buildings or beyond the edge of campuses, so once the students are outside of that WiFi coverage range, it all switches to the phone networks.
The networks are probably built based on population, but the type of population and denser than average short term congregations of people can also have an effect as well as we seem to hear every time there's a big event on.
To be fair, Durham is a city with many close hills, protected areas where they can't set up masts and the buildings in the centre are often built close together. Added together with the fact it is surrounded by university students (massive data hogs) - it is always likely to be a bit of a brown spot from a mobile perspective. Having said that, I had absolutely no problems getting a fast 4G signal there two weeks ago with my o2.de SIM card, so it isn't all that bad
I suppose the real question is, what do they mean by "switching off 3G"? Are they just going to start turning off the 3G kit at the masts or are they going to be taking time to replace 3G kit with 4/5G kit at each location as they go? Does it mean that the 4/5G kit goes in using the existing 4/5G bands or can 4/5G phones adapt to 3G bands with 4/5G running on it? Can 4/5G even work on 3G bands? I'd guess so, since they seem to use similar but different bands.
That's good......my 3G mobile has just died, and my new 2G mobile looks good for another ten years!
Don't you like this sort of progress.....in the advanced and advancing UK?
.....and all because there are millions of 2G so-called "smart meters" installed which are not going to be replaced any time soon!
.....did I really say "smart"?
They're just doing this so it's easier to spy on you.
2G has literally no encryption. 2.5G aka EDGE brings only 56bit DES encryption that can be cracked in a matter of seconds.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/your-phone-vulnerable-because-2g-it-doesnt-have-be
Yeah, so to make it easier to spy on you they're keeping one old legacy, abandoning all the pathetic encryption schemes in 3G/4G, and forcing you to 5G.... which has proper EAP TLS which is the first mobile standard to actually use a known-secure algorithm.
Literally everything below 5G didn't have encryption worthy of the name, even on their day of standardisation or years later.
And things like SS7 ... god, what a security mess.
If you're worried about encryption and people "listening in", let me give you a hint:
- You cannot rely on any mainstream public communications service.
- You don't know enough to roll your own (trust me.. you don't, no matter what you think).
- When you do, you'll light up like a Christmas tree on the radar of anyone who cares about what you might be doing.
Also, the majority of your data is going over the data channels anyway, including your Wifi calling, and they all have well-known endpoints. You'd be an idiot to try to "break" the encryption, for any official purpose - e.g. to "spy on you" - of the phone radio connection itself, when you could just tap the ISP side of the data channel or ask the telco to flag your calls.
That's how the US were deploying vans to monitor communications at large events... your phone was talking to them, and they are just authorised base-stations as far as your phone is concerned. Encryption in that case is utterly worthless, your phone is told it can trust those base-stations by the telco issuing valid certificates to them, etc.
@Lee_D
Quote: "...You don't know enough to roll your own ... trust me.. you don't ..."
You may be correct......but when messages are privately encrypted BEFORE they enter any public channel...
...then the snoops have a good deal more heavy lifting to do.....
...more so if the end points are burners, or otherwise anonymous.....
So...why should I or my friends make it easier for the snoops? No, we don't have any obligation in that regard!
@Lee_D
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It's not just smart meters, it's a whole slew of commercial/industrial kit requiring a voice and/or data connection - alarm panels, emergency comms equipment, instrumentation/telemetry for remote monitoring etc. etc - i.e. the sort of stuff that, unlike the almost throw-away nature of consumer-grade stuff these days, is still built to last for a significant period of time without any expectation that it would need to be replaced/upgraded.
...and all have a registered SIM too, so the provider knows who they are to send the bills and the notifications off the switch off to. Whether those customers actually see and act on the notices is another matter. If john.Smith@company.co.uk is the email contact and he left for pastures new 5 years ago, then that might be an issue for the customers to deal with.
My experience with one client some years ago is no, they won't notice until systems fail. In the case I was involved in, some of their connection to HQ in London were failing, others working. It turned out some of the databases were authenticating on allowed IP addresses as an extra security layer and their provider had rejigged the network causing their branch office IP to change. A cheap provider offering "fixed" IP address in the guise of very long lease DHCP - eventually the email from 3 months prior and the follow ups, were found. Luckily for me, I used the same provider so when their HQ IT bods told me the incoming connection was from the "wrong" IP address, I twigged what had happed as I knew they had network engineering going on in the area, leading to the local PHB hunting down the emails and I earned my money that day not actually "doing stuff" but by "knowing stuff" :-)
Our area is hopeless for mobile signal (southern Welsh borders). Nothing on a bad day, 4G very rarely. In the country village, but not remote.
For voice we need that strangely unadvertised mobile feature WiFi Calling, but that only covers voice calls. Bank and other security check texts only use the network.
I'm guessing the '3' in the Three network explains why I don't get 2G.
Smart meter installer gave up before reaching us, when he realised how bad the signal was.
So sounds like I'm another who will have to go backwards to go forwards and change networks to obtain 2G.
What I have is 10 years old and lasts a week on a charge. From what I see newer ones do not last very long.
This also means that I will have no reception at all when I visit a friend in rural Wales, 3G is bad enough there & 4G is a fantasy!
.
What is the current best replacement for vanilla privacy sucking android ?
Well, to my knowledge there's no vanilla Android, but you can have KitKat (Android 4.4), Lollipop (5.0), Marshmallow (6.0), Nougat (7.0), Oreo (8.0), Pie (9.0), Jelly Bean, Ice Cream Sandwich, Honeycomb, Gingerbread, Froyo, Eclair, Donut or Cupcake.
Privacy sucking all of them, different flavours.
My cubot "king kong 7" (silly name, i know) lasts about a week, with its 5000mAh battery, and basically runs stock android (it has google play etc. but basically has no third-party shit or bundled apps)
It's probably passed it's sell by date by now, but as my previous cubot phone also had stock android, I'm sure the newer models will too.
"Same in Norfolk....lots of trees = not lots of 4G"
No, I'm 400 yards from where they cut down all the trees to make way for a new "development of 2000 luxurious town houses" in the middle of what used to be the country, they can apparently get 700Mb landlines and 5G. I can't get 4G indoors and only outside by doing phone-semaphore half way up the garden whilst standing on one leg. Turning off 3G is just having a laugh.
Depending on what you do with it, you can get that with modern hardware. They have simple 4G phones which last a while on battery because you're not doing much with them. That is not guaranteed if you turn on the hotspot or insist on having them run apps, which most of them can do but not very well, but if you use them like an old feature phone, it will have battery life like one. If you can manage to use a smartphone like that, you'll generally get even better battery life since the batteries are so much larger. I've tested this with a phone that remains unused except to make calls on occasion, and the battery lasts more than a week easily, and five days with the hotspot function turned on all the way through.
Have you seen licence-free channels and the mess people make of them?
It'd be swamped to death in seconds and largely unusable, plus you'd have to severely limit the power allowed (especially given the range current given to 3G, you'd want to dial that down if you don't want the guy in the next town interfering with your signal).
There needs to be an obligation to actually supply 4G before they turn off the 3G.
I live in a 'not spot' for all the networks, although their coverage maps say that we should get 3G and 4G, and the customer support droids only refer to that!
FFS I can actually see a transmitter from upstairs windows! (I will admit that I'm probably outside of that particular cell, as they are gradually putting up more towers and reducing the cell radius accordingly.)
Icon as I wrote the assembler code for echo and noise cancellation routines for some Nokia phones last century. All paths through the filters had to take exactly the same number of clock cycles and I achieved it with only one NOP. (How many of the younglings even know about such things?)
NOP was EA on the processor I learned on. One of these if you did too -->
(Things get interesting on a processor where every instruction has a condition field. You probably want there to be an "always" condition; and it just keeps the silicon simple also to have a "never" condition. This means your instruction set is effectively peppered with lots of NOPs.)
When DECT first came out (I had serial number 6 on my dev board) I used it so that the car park supervisor at the Twin Towers would be told when one of the lamps in his vast underground car park was ABOUT to fail (slight change in the colour output). [Predictive analysis]
A Jet Heritage charity didn't have the money to change engines every x hours. I produced cockpit H/W and S/W to log the current used to start the engine to work out over time when it might fail. [Predictive analysis and when used over the whole fleet, would probably class as big data]
Home automation with wireless, X10, IP and mobile (via SMS and MMS) control and reporting.
Neural nets in its early days demonstrating voice recognition for a major UK bank.
Matching engines and exhausts for a high performance car (and racing) manufacturer - so old that the the details were stored on dBase and the matching algorithms in Pascal (with feedback when the power output of the pair was measured, this tweeked a large matrix.) [Machine learning]
Warehouse picking and (very limited space) stand-down area allocation for a major distribution company. Had to work out the picking sheets for every picker, how to utilise the stand-down area (space for 8 lorry loads), how to load the lorries (60 lorries per night), and when the lorries had to leave (to fit their delivery slots), all within 30 minutes of the orders coming in. (Acceptance criteria, was that the software had to do it better than the team of 3 people with 20+ years experience, each! And they did it incrementally over 3 hours.) [Basically, what would now be called a digital twin, was built and used to tweek the basic algorithms output to actually fit all the constraints.]
These (and probably many more that I can't remember) were all last century!
Quote
"All paths through the filters had to take exactly the same number of clock cycles and I achieved it with only one NOP. (How many of the younglings even know about such things?)"
I do because I had to debug an interupt servicing routine that took 65 msec to process on the longest case. bit of pisser when the interupts were coming in every 60 msec.
Then again... I'm no youngling
I don't think I qualify for either of those, but I use 3G.
I would quite happily use 4G if there was a decent and suitable phone, but there is not.
I cannot stand touch screen interfaces, preferring a proper keyboard. Neither can I stand the UI on android or apple devices, which to all intents looks and feels like it was made for someone with the intelligence of a 6 year old to use ( 6 year olds can use it, so it must be). Not to mention the constant bloatware, spyware, trackware and feck knows what else google and apple are doing to their users without consent or knowledge. I have no desire to sign up an account and give my personal details to those insidious companies just to use a device I have bought and paid for.
Nor the horrible slim design which just slips out of my fingers all the time, which you cannot hold or grab without accidentally doing something onscreen. Nor the sealed devices with no chance of swapping batteries, etc.
My Nokia N95 finally died around 5 years ago, and since then I've used a blackberry from a 2nd hand shop that cost all of £40 and is perfectly fine for what I need: calls, text, occasional email, occasional photograph, occasional calculator. If I want to do something online I will use a laptop (if I can stand the small display) or desktop with a pair of 26inch monitors.
Despite all the lies and ill informed articles last year, Blackberries still work fine. When RIM shut down their servers the only thing I seem to have lost is tethering, though that stopped a few months beforehand, so I'm not entirely convinced it was the same issue - more likely EE did some config change, though they denied it.
EE have throttled their 3G network in recent years anyway, as I no longer get the coverage and speeds I used to - probably since covid times I've found I have to have 2G enabled to get service in many places. And EE's 2G always was crap, from the earliest days of 0 range and One-to-None.
So come on world - introduce a sensible and capable 4G phone that is not infected by either google and apple and I may take an interest to "upgrade".
Somehow I doubt EE will be contacting me to discuss my needs.
My Blackberry Classic works 'fine' in the commonly accepted usage of that word.
It makes phone calls, especially good on speaker-phone when I'm trying to herd kittens (aka achieve consensus).
It sends and receives SMS messages and email.
The camera is basically crap but it can resolve a page of handwriting if photographed in good light and the 'whiteboard' filter can process the resulting image into something I can print out after emailing to an actual computer.
What else does one need?
From a UI - both screen and physical - I loved my BB Classic and if they brought out an iPhone with the same keyboard and PDA management I'd buy two. I could have written a novel with that keyboard whereas I struggle to type "Red Lion, 8pm" on the iPhone and phone in anything longer than that. Message organization was fantastic. I loved the idea of it - and the heft of it.
The things that made me bin it (literally - I couldn't give it away) were no way to synch anything between it and anything else without it being a right pain in the arse. All the BB/RIM native desktop synch tools for Mac didn't do anything - I never got them working and got no help from BB/RIM. Synching contacts and calendar was a pain (mainly Apple's fault, but the net result was the same) and there was no way to synch ToDos with any Mac apps.
And then useful stuff stopped being supported. I was travelling all over the place then and there was a BB app that found all travel data from mails and texts, collected it together as trips in a dedicated app and added it to the calendar. Fantastic - till it stopped.
Exactly!
I'm hapily an Android user but I use older handsets. I wont have 5G for a long while yet, I have so many spare 4G handsets to use up.
I also have 3G only spares, now consiged to the bin. What a waste.
I'd love a physical keyboard, Blackberries are great for that. Many times I've found a touchscreen just too limiting. I'm a bit fed up of the constant upgrade cycle we are all forced into whether it be mobile handsets or network standards. So many 3G/2G embedded devices are out there doing "smart" things that we expect in out connected world. Now they will be disconnected, mothballed, adding costs to replace them if they ever are replaced.
2G reaches almost everywhere. 3G more so than 4G. 4G fails to deliver bytes when an area is congested and as I found recently when driving across the UK 4G barely exists along the main roads!
Take a train from Bedford to London. A large part between Luton and London is almost a total not spot even for 2G. These network upgrades are peddled as the best thing since sliced bread, in the same way as the previous network generation was, yet it simply doesnt work. People laugh at me when I talk about payphones and land lines, heck even CB radio, but on a simple train trip or a drive from Bedford to Bristol I feel vindicated.
Perhaps we should mandate that 5G is the LAST netowrk upgrade for, say 20 years and it must have 100% UK coverage, every household and every B road? Then maybe we will enter the world of mobiles. Till then I'll keep my landline and CB radio. The CB gets use from hobbists mostly but they are there. Unlkine the mobile networks.
I can recommend the Unihertz Titan range. linky to website
Doing tech support for the olds (in their mid-80s) one's on an iPhone the other hates touch screens, partly due to arthritic hands - and is on the Titan slim. He found a ten year-old (brand new still in shrink) Blackberry for not as cheap as it should have been on Amazon. I had a look at setting it up for him, before sending it back. I was incredibly impressed with the quality of the keyboard, even though I hate them, due to fat fingers. And can now understand why they cost so much back in the day, that was some impressive engineering. Andrew Orlowski was always singing BB's praises. Andrew O the Jonah of mobile phone technologies...
Anyway I was quite impressed with the Titan. The keyboard is nowhere near as nice/elegant as the Blackberry ones, but it's perfectly decent. And you seem to be able to mostly use the phone without being forced to use the touch screen, if you don't want to. They're still bodging a touch screen onto Android, so it's not as integrated or functional as the old Blackberry days, but then those days have passed. And he's still happily using it a year later, I've had no complaints - and he's not gone out and bought an upgrade - which he has a tendency to do. So he's obviously a happy camper.
The techy friend who put me onto Titan also has one. Another Jonah, like Orlowski. He's still soldiering on with his beloved Palm Pre, until they turn off 3G, and he's forced to stop. But he's played with it and declares himself satisfied.
I haven't seen any other keyboard types. And Titan are available on Amazon, so you can sent it back if you're not happy.
Yep, they work great. My BB Classic does everything I need without being beholden to Google or Apple. Nothing as efficient as the BB Hub for messaging and no other mobile platform seems to understand how notifications should work. The same shortcut keys that worked on my 957 Internet Edition still work on BB10.
To me it is amazing the things that are broken in iOS and Android that RIM figured out 20 years ago.
I've just moved house, so I've been without WiFi for a month while Openreach pulled their finger out and installed fibre.
While we waited we had to manage with 3G most of the time, with a woeful 1meg data rate.
The most annoying thing is if I walk 50 paces to the end of the black I can see Three's nice new 5G masts attached to the roof of the theatre on the prom, the signal passes right over us, sprinkling a smattering of 5G fairy dust over the office in the loft as it passes...
and i'm an EE customer and I live in Warrington. I like to think i'm reasonably tech savvy and up to speed on things but this has totally slipped me by and I have had no communication about this either electronically or otherwise.
So i'm not surprised they have had no complaints because I can guarantee that 99.9% of the population of Warrington on EE had no idea they were even in a trail.
Well I guess keeping us in the dark is one way to get a resounding "success" from the trial.
If you are "tech savvy" and live in an area where they turned off 3G and you didn't notice, then that's a win for EE. Clearly you were getting a signal of some sort and it was good enough for you and your phone was quite happy with 4/5G or you never use data. A 3G phone will still make voice calls on 2G according to the EE page about the switch-off.
True, but my point being (maybe not articulated well enough) if my mobile is being used in a trial where they are removing part of my service I am paying for, then surely I should have been informed before and during the trial rather than finding out afterwords in an article on The Register.
I'm still not clear what you mean by "removing part of my service I am paying for". Is your phone 3G only and so you lost data services (and didn't notice), in which case, yes you have a beef with EE and I understand that, or is your phone capable of 4 or 5G and so all that changed was the method by which the service was delivered and so didn't actually remove part of your paid for service?
(NB, that down vote wasn't mine, I'm just trying to work out what you lost, if anything)
"The company has already trialled this in Warrington in north west England, where 3G services were no longer available from July 18 this year, and claimed it had received no customer complaints (which we find hard to believe), and so it will be following the same approach across the country."
That is because the people who *would* complain had no 3G to complain over !!!
:)
When I was a child we visited my grandmother and in the evening sat down to watch the TV, but she told us it had broken a few months ago, she didn't watch much it anyway so wasn't bothered. It was only when I was older and remembered her TV couldn't get BBC2, so it must have been a 405 line VHF set (BBC2 was only on 625 line UHF), and that time we went around was just they switched off the old VHF service.
I wonder how many grandmothers will find their 3G mobile no longer works, just think it's broken, and probably not say anything because they don't use it much.
My mother is a grandmother. So how come she doesn't take such a relaxed attitude to broken technology? I do get dinner and a chat out of it, so mustn't grumble. But if technology breaks I get a phonecall asking for help fixing it, and then the dinner invite to come up and actually fix it.
Maybe it's just the grandchildren that are never to be bothered? I notice they do far better in terms of puddings and sweets than we ever did. So perhaps they suffer less in terms of tech support as well?
Without 3G, will granny be able to call you?
She might not be able to fix her own stuff. But if things like the TV don't work, or she loses her ability to communicate with the grandchildren, she'll find a way to contact me to get it fixed. Whatever it takes. She cannot be reasoned with, she cannon be bargained with, and she just will not stop.
When 3G was being auctioned off, there was a website showing the latest bids and by which operator. The amounts became eye watering and refreshing the page constantly to see the latest ridiculous bid was a lot of fun.
I am a little confused though ... I thought for a while there smart meters were running on 2G. Are they now all being upgraded to 4G+ ?
Depending on whether those are 3G data connections or 2G SMS ones, they will stop working or carry on respectively. At least from looking at a few pages online, it appears that the providers that are discontinuing 3G in the UK intend to keep 2G online for a while. That won't help people who had data connections running over 3G, but anything that sent data as SMS, as virtual voice calls, or using one of the mostly nonfunctional 2G data methods should continue to work. This is not necessarily true in other countries, as many of those which have already shut down 3G (east Asia and North America mostly) or are going to (Europe, various others) included 2G and shut them down simultaneously. Maybe 2G infrastructure is less popular there for some reason or the mobile companies are even less concerned about it.
With you switching off the PSTN network and now 3G? It seems to me that you are in danger of shooting yourself in both knees on the eve of your Marathon race.
You (yes you BT) are already hated by a lot of the population. These two moves will make you loathed beyond all recognition if you are not extra, extra, extra careful.
Where is the information programme to prepare users for these quite dramatic changes? {All I hear is crickets}
" despite 3G usage falling to just 0.6 percent of total data downloaded and 7 percent of voice traffic this summer."
According to Ofcom there are 87 million active mobile devices in the UK, which means that if 7 percent of them are using 3G for voice that is over 6 million devices still using it. So that seems like a significant amount of users to me. And no doubt a lot of those users don't have a choice to move to 5G because they live in areas where 5G doesn't and might never be rolled out.
Early 4G LTE phones only supported data over LTE. They fell back to 3G UMTS or 2G GSM for voice since the voice over LTE wasn't an option yet. If neither 2G or 3G voice networks are available, those phones likely won't be able to make voice calls without a SIP voice app like Google Voice.
Lots of stuff in the comments... Anyway.
Why is 3G ( and by extension 2G ) going the way of the Dodo ?
It's a simple frequency matter. They need to go to make room to 5G. ( and to a lesser extend to a better 4G )
In Europe ( and UK ) :
- most of the 2G Frequencies are in the 900Mhz and 1800Mhz range.
- most of the 3G Frequencies are in the 900Mhz and 2100Mhz range. ( I guess you start to see the issue )
- most of the 4G Frequencies are in the 700MHz, 800Mhz, 900Mhz, 1800Mhz, 2100Mhz and 2600Mhz range ( now it should start to become obvious )
- most of the 5G Frequencies are in the 700MHz, 800Mhz, 900Mhz, 1800MHz, 2100Mhz, 2600Mhz and 3500Mhz ( now it should be obvious )
you can only cram so many channels in a given frequency range...
So you need to free the range from the stuff that used it ( say ditch the 2/3G in the 900Mhz/1800Mhz/2100Mhz ) in order to reuse it for a new purpose. ( say 5G )
That's also what occurred with the 700Mhz range, it was used by the TV broadcast, and with DVB-T they freed most of the range to be reused in mobile phones.
"Switching 3G off to make room for 5G". The implication being if you live in a 3G only service area, it will be replaced with a nice shiny 5G service.
Thankfully, Vodafone will charge you an extra 10% for an equivalent 5G compatible contract (£30 a month SIM only for "Unlimited", £33 a month for "Unlimited Max" which is the same plan but "includes 5G at no extra cost"... except for the £3).
Best I can tell, the rest don't charge more for 5G.
Many comments bemoaning the loss of 3G coverage as if it's 3G tech that causes this. As a radio technology, 3G is woefully inefficient compared with 4G - but coverage is massively dictated by the frequency band, EE operated 3G on 2100Mhz and the coverage pattern from 2G1800/4G1800 should at least match that if not exceed.
Low-band 4G800 deployment should easily exceed it.
The range / coverage of 4G and 5G is very low, possibly 2-3 miles, it means that as the frequency being so high does not bend around the world so if you cannot see it then you cannot receive it. Frankly in some places it will mean a total loss of phone coverage. For example 5g is possibly only about 2-3 postcodes, so if you have a house in a fairly isolated valley , nearest neighbour a couple of miles away then forget the mobile, no chance. Have you noticed the large towers with what looks like drums on them? have you, well these are often in similar frequencies aimed at another tower and these run many kilowatts often but they must be LOS, or line of sight. (incidentally these may cause serious health problems when the signal touches land or a sprog due to a bent dish). If not then no operation.
Sorry to say, but you're confusing a radio technology (2G GSM, 3G UMTS, 4G LTE or 5G-NR) with frequencies which do indeed have coverage characteristics.
4G on 800Mhz has a much different coverage footprint to 4G on 2600Mhz from the same location.
Equally a 3G900 footprint would broadly match 4G800 and 3G2100 be similar to 4G2100.
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