AT&T Pulls The Plug On Its 2G Network

We knew it was coming, but now AT&T has made it official: the carrier's 2G network is no more. AT&T announced this week that it has shut down its 2G network, a move that's been years in the making. The kicker is that the shutdown happened without most people even realizing it, as AT&T said the network has been inactive since January 1.

The fact that AT&T shut down its 2G network more than two weeks ago without suffering much in the way of push back from its users shows that there isn't much consumer need for it here in 2017. While this probably won't matter in the slightest to most of AT&T's regular consumers, this shut down can cause a lot of headaches for IoT customers that still rely on 2G networks.

In the case of San Francisco's Muni public transportation system, there's a large portion of vehicles that haven't been upgraded to 3G hardware yet. This, in turn, means that those vehicles are "invisible" to the NextMuni system and are giving wildly inaccurate arrival estimates. The move away from 2G could cause similar problems all around the country, as many smart city infrastructures are built on these cellular networks.

T-Mobile was recently seen making a play for those AT&T IoT customers who might be left out in the cold with this move. Toward the end of last year, T-Mobile announced that it will be keeping its 2G network active through 2020 and tried to tempt 2G AT&T customers into switching by offering free data and SIM cards. All 2G networks face the same fate in the end (Verizon's own shut down is scheduled for 2019), but T-Mobile offering customers three more years to upgrade hardware might have moved some to switch.

AT&T says the motivation behind shutting down its 2G network now is to free up spectrum space for incoming technologies, specifically 5G. While we wait on 5G to arrive on a large scale, AT&T says that the freshly freed spectrum will be repurposed for LTE.

SOURCE: AT&T