Verizon blinks again - 3g lives on

Well, they blew through another deadline for shutting off 3g. I think this is the 4th or 5th "deadline".
The Gusto 2 lives on to talk another day (year? decade?)
I think I'm going to keep it alive until the end to see if an upgrade offer EVER comes.
www.theverge.com/2021/1/5/22215453/verizon-3g-shutdown-paused-delay-network-old-phones

No complaints about the delays here...our very reliable Twigby service depends upon them & the 3G works just fine.

Mixed bag for me. I was hoping to see whether or not 3G shutoff would help make my Umidigi A3S work flawlessly on Xfinity. On the other hand, the 2 iPhone 6's that I have purposely kept on IOS 10.1.1 and 9.3.1 will continue to work on Xfinity.

bingyee wrote: Mixed bag for me. I was hoping to see whether or not 3G shutoff would help make my Umidigi A3S work flawlessly on Xfinity. On the other hand, the 2 iPhone 6's that I have purposely kept on IOS 10.1.1 and 9.3.1 will continue to work on Xfinity.

 

This

.I think I'm not surprised by this delay, since I was expecting it to be a total mess if they in fact shut down 3G at this point. My relief has nothing to do with VoLTE-- it has to do with texting.
I'm not an expert on this by any means, and have only learned a little by experimenting, reading, and thinking about it-- so I could be wrong about a lot of this!

Dumping 3G may not be as simple as only allowing VoLTE capable phones on the network-- it also requires that lines be provisioned for CDMA-less service.  Even with VoLTE, it appears that sms falls back by default to 3G unless CDMA-less provisioning exists on the line.  It's not clear to me how many existing phones are, or are not, capable of CDMA-less operation, but it doesn't seem to be something that has happened automatically as an update to line provisioning, and it seems that many MVNOs don't understand it, or can't/won't enable it on request.

From recent reports I've seen elsewhere, it seems like Verizon is becoming more strict about not allowing SIM-swapping on MVNOs-- something that they've largely ignored even though it's never been officially allowed.  I suspect that this may be tied in to that CDMA-less provisioning issue, since any change in provisioning doesn't happen if a SIM is swapped into a different phone.  (My personal experience is in moving a SIM from a non-CDMA-less phone to a CDMA-less phone, and not being able to get texting to work.)

I guess a lot of Verizon customers rely on 3G devices. Is there any chance AT&T blinks too? Now that Verizon has blinked, it makes it more possible that AT&T blinks too, right? Does T-Mobile have any 3G shutdowns planned?

T-Mobile will proceed. In my opinion, they've done the best job of transitioning to a full LTE solution.

In my opinion, Verizon has bungled this at every stage. AT&T is obviously just starting to do anything so that customers can predict what will work & what won't work (and it's not encouraging so far.)

Regardless of how badly they've handled it, both AT&T and Verizon will proceed despite previous, and possibly future, delays. It's in their financial interest to do so.

Remember the $5/month unlimited 3g flashed MiFis that went away, way back when?

I had had a Galaxy Note 2 flashed to 3g and it's still plugging along with unlimited data for $5/month.

It survived the MiFi genocide probably because I occasionally make calls and send text messages with it, just to show some typical phone usage.

I'm going to keep paying my $5/mo and ride this wave for as long as it goes.