It depends on where you are, some carriers are choosing to maintain GSM while shutting down UMTS, mainly because 2G serves a good fallback voice, SMS and IoT communication system, however insecure(!) it is. Both 3GPP and GSMA didn't really develop a successor to GSM (a basic, reliable, low-powered communication standard) so this is indeed a weird state of affairs, but GSM carrier equipment is still being manufactured for this exact reason.
I thought so too, but looking into it yesterday, what seems to be happening is that 3G is being shutdown. The largest GSM network in Denmark is 2G, 4G and 5G.
But my clear understanding was that 2G was long gone, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
Interesting. Thanks
No such plans in Russia. No plans to deploy 5G either tho
No one is willing to supply 5G equipment to Russia due to the sanctions.
The 4G networks are already degrading.
It's not because of that, it's primarily because the military won't give up the frequencies used for 5G elsewhere.
4,4 – 4,99 Ghz was allocated, but Rostelecom cannot even launch VoWIFI because of sanctions.