Re: I live in a rural area
You miss the point. They want to retire 2G in order to reuse that spectrum in urban areas, in order to do that they need to retire 2G everywhere, which means they must upgrade rural towers. They'll upgrade to LTE because that's cheap and widespread now, and because it gives them the opportunity for a second revenue stream from fixed wireless.
The main limiting factor is running fiber to towers that have only a T1 backhaul. That was fine for 2G, but obviously not enough for LTE. I wouldn't be surprised if in VERY rural areas, like places with population densities of only a couple people per square mile, if you see "LTE" on your phone but have terrible throughput. It'll be a tower with LTE that still has the T1 backhaul, because it was deemed too expensive to run fiber to that particular tower and the population density was so low fixed wireless wouldn't bring in enough reveue to pay for the backhaul upgrade.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
