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Comment by betaby | Hacker News Reader

Most of the USA is VoLTE-only for a ~year already. For other countries see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G#Phase-out

Even 2 years ago, I got an iPhone 5 from somewhere and found that because it didn’t support VoLTE, no carriers would support a new connection. They would support you if you were already on board for a little while.

No, the 2G network is still running at least for T-Mobile. I happened to check earlier today.

New T-Mobile SIMs haven't been able to work in 2G phones for a bit now. If you have an older SIM that's still active you can use it in a 2G phone but they don't want new customers using non-VoLTE devices on their network. They also haven't invested in expandning their 2G footprint since about 2015 when their network was significantly smaller. The 2G service will be discounted in April.

I happen to have a newly bought T-Mobile prepaid SIM card. It offers limited "high speed data" (4G, 5G, etc) and unlimited "slow speed data" (2G, 3G). Once I ran out of "high speed data", my service was supposed to fallback to 2G, but it doesn't work. I asked why via customer support and the consultant said that they know that it doesn't work, even though they're selling it. Took me 60 minutes on the phone to get to that point. I just gave up. I ended up paying 30 dollars for around 3gb of data and wasting a bunch of time. T-Mobile has been horrible in my limited experience.

You don't fall back to the actual 2g connection. You're supposed to fall back to 2g speeds aka 128kbps or 256kbps. You'll still be connected to LTE towers, just at painfully slow speeds.

Correct, it just feels like it’s not working because almost nothing is designed to function at such slow speeds (HN is one of the good ones though!)

There’s a hidden advantage: you use the phone a lot less when outside. It’s enough for email, chat and a slow map. Could feel both annoying and a blessing at the same time

That would be great, but in my case I am getting no connection at all. Hacker News times out.

In case it actually meant unlimited data on actual 3G, the towers are not going to force downgrade to 3G just because the data plan had ran out. You’ll have to turn off LTE from phone’s settings app.

They're much better than verizon who will just terminate your line with maybe a little bit of heads up.

We found out the hard way when they terminated our line after having a sim card in a non volte phone for about a week, and didn't get the text alert until AFTER the line was disconnected.

> ’The 2G service will be discounted in April.’

The last nail in the coffin for my Motorola Razr V3

4/2/2024 is the planned shutdown.

Yeah, my carrier forced me to upgrade two years ago when they went VoLTE-only.

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