(The opening lines of https://osmocom.org/news/30: "3G is dead, you may think. From the perspective of large scale operators, that may well be the case, but this is precisely the reason why Open Source support for 3G is becoming increasingly interesting: when the focus for earning money shifts towards LTE infrastructure, the threshold for setting up 3G networks is becoming easier to surpass for everyone else.")
But not every country tried that hard, e.g. in the Netherlands one can broadcast with low power (e.g. have your own indoor/campus wide network) or in the US spectrum can be licensed for smaller regions.
Functioning can mean a lot of things. A security researcher trying to downgrade a device from 4G to 3G and then to 2G will be quite happy with a single eNodeB/nodeB/BTS set-up and is glad about low output power. A company to provide coverage on their campus can be quite happy too.
Look at the economic activity created around a "junk" wireless band: 2.4GHz. It is junk because of absorption by water molecules, and that's why microwave ovens use it.
Despite how crappy it is, and how much interference it gets, it is so, so useful. WiFi, Bluetooth, and dozens of other protocols. We get so much use out of it.
If some other bands were opened up in the same way for unlicensed use (conforming to a TX power limit of course), we could create more and more applications, especially if it was a bit lower in frequency to allow longer range communication with reasonable power consumption.
But there's no space worldwide for that, because it has all been sold off or otherwise provisioned. It is such a shame.