To be fair, this is often the claimed solution with AT&T and at least sometimes I'm certain it's BS (e.g. for a Samsung S10e, Verizon told my elderly friend the same thing last year). Hence my question.
In this case, it's not quite BS from AT&T. They wanted to use the spectrum they had been using for 3G to make their LTE network better and certain old LTE devices couldn't do voice-over-LTE (the 3G network would handle voice communication). One could argue that they could have kept the 3G network alive longer (Verizon and T-Mobile shut 3G down in 2022), but at some point old devices stop being able to talk on modern networks. At some point, there's a balance between keeping old networks alive and being able to reuse that spectrum for more efficient networks that serve the vast majority of your customers.
Many countries still have working 3G networks that the iPhone 5S can connect to and they can still be used as WiFi devices in the US (oh, and I'm sure there are some regional carriers in the US that still support 3G).
Except it's more BS than you think. The iPhone 5S supports VoLTE technically. But AT&T blocked that feature on those phones.
T-Mobile still has a 2G network operating in most of the country and the 5S supports voLTE so it can use both 2G and LTE for calls. It does not have any low band support, so indoor and rural coverage will suck, but it will work.
Even if it didn't have voLTE it would still work on T-Mobile on LTE data and if you were in a GSM market it would fall back to 2G to make calls. The stores won't activate it, but you can take an activated sim card and pop it in and they will not blacklist it.
T-Mobile technically still has 3G broadcasting on their femtocells so that's another option for calls/data if you're around them.
Both models are VoLTE compliant. AT&T whitelisted the former supposedly because they once sold/supported this model directly, but told existing users of the latter to replace their phone or GTFO.
I gladly took the GTFO option and switched to T-Mobile...substantially reduced my monthly bill to less than $17/mo per phone and saw improved reception at the office.
India had that in the past but since 2008-09 at least we have this system where you buy your phone from the market and use whatever sim card you like.
everyone has the same plans for the same price so its a matter of preference/ network quality, etc etc.
i find this funny that w
people, if they have to buy a phone on EMI, they do that from the bank and not the network provider
Verizon doesn’t do that luckily, I believe they suspended new line activate with 5S however for existing lines they are not disable your line like AT&T yet.
I also don't really understand what you mean by "slowly force everyone ASAP". That's sort of a self-contradictory phrase.
Almost everything supports GSM, so almost everything can manage, and then nobody needs to throw out their 2G only (or 2G/3G) car junk or power meters or who knows what else. Yeah, it's going to be slow, but whatever; people who want something better can upgrade in most cases, and the 2G usage can't be that high anymore. Carriers could even gasp cooperate and allow roaming on 2g, so you didn't need three of four different networks each spending a sliver of spectrum on it.
4G: 600 MHz, 700 MHz, 1700/2100 MHz, 2300 MHz, and 2500 MHz, bands.
5G: 24 GHz up to 54 GHz.
Sure, it's an eventuality. But in the near term, is 6g really going to use 900MHz?