Belgium will pull the plug on 3g at the end of the year, some providers already have. Obviously it is less of a problem than in Vietnam
In Slovakia there's 4 carriers.
Telekom shut down 3G at the end of 2023.
Orange shut down 3G 4 days ago.
O2 plans to finish 3G shutdown by 2026.
Swan never had 3G as they entered the market in 2015.
However, there's many devices relying on 2G. Thus 2G shutdown is currently planned for 2030, though there's been some push to move it to 2028.
Sucks for me. I was enjoying 30Mbps on 3G as I was basically the only one using it. Meanwhile 4G enjoys getting overloaded to 1Mbps during the day or even less. Although the situation improved to around 4Mbps now as the frequencies used for 3G are now used for 4G, allowing for some load balancing.
A lot of IoT devices still relies on 2G...
During lunch time, I used to be able to switch to 3G and get a healthy 50mbps when it was 1mbps on 4G. This was before 5G so I think it's mostly solved now.
A few years ago, I saw a cheap GSM adapter for a PC for e.g. emergency messages of the server. It was cheap, as it only supported 3G. Luckily, I checked availability of 3G before I bought it, as it would have been a doorstopper here.
2G? That is a word I have not heard in a long time.
It came up quite a lot in some of the various threads about the recent ATT mobile outage.
OK, that is USA. They have been a bit backwards for a long time, so this is not a surprise.
For once it's not the companies fault here, you should have seen some of the Reddit threads whenever a 2G or 3G network shutdown was announced
People coming out of the woodwork whining because their phone from 2009 or some shit wouldn't work anymore lmao
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