T-Mobile is still operating its 2G network, believe it or not, but not for long. The magenta carrier has announced that it will finally be shutting it down on August 3. T-Mobile is the last US carrier to do so – AT&T was the first to retire its 2G network in 2017, and Verizon did it in 2020.
T-Mobile stuck with 2G “to give customers and partners additional time to migrate legacy devices. Other carriers shut down their GSM networks earlier, and T-Mobile helped fill that gap by maintaining support while customers transitioned to newer technologies”, a T-Mobile spokesperson explained.
Another reason had to do with international roaming, specifically the fact that a certain percentage of customers coming to the US did not have VoLTE enabled and so relied on circuit switched voice calls operated over the 2G network.
T-Mobile worked with its roaming partners globally over the past two and a half years on this issue, ensuring that they’re now at a point where “nobody would lose any kind of service, either from a voice or data perspective”.
So that’s why now’s the right time to finally shut down the 2G network. T-Mobile killed its 3G network back in 2022, and it also shut down Sprint’s LTE network the same year after having acquired Sprint in 2020.
