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.)