T-Mobile’s 2G service has somehow eluded death after all these years. Both AT&T and Verizon have folded their 2G service a long time ago, and yet, T-Mobile’s 2G towers still stand proud today.
Most phones today use 4G and 5G, and T-Mobile’s 2G service somehow managed to outlive the company’s 3G service, which was killed off in 2022. Nonetheless, after postponing a previous shutdown date of April 2nd, we seem to finally have a date for T-Mobile sunsetting its 2G service, and it’s pretty soon.
T-Mobile has added a date for when its 2G service’s capacity and coverage is “expected to change.” The service should begin shutdown on September 1st, 2024. The date was quietly added without a major announcement, and it was added sometime after August 5th, as a former Google cache of the page (which has now also been updated) previously showed.
It’s not clear if users that are being affected by this move (we’re not sure if there are a lot of them out there in the first place) are still being notified of this. We wouldn’t be surprised if they’re not, to be completely frank—the fact that the date is less than a month away shows that T-Mobile wants to get this done and over with as soon as possible, and doesn’t care too much about any potential casualties this late in the game.
That being said, the company did alert 2G (and 3G users at one point) that the service was ending, and offered free phone replacements. Those customers should have taken them up on that offer long ago by now, however.
We should note that if you somehow still use a 2G or 3G phone, you’ll likely be negatively affected by this. Since T-Mobile’s 3G network died in 2022, this means that any 3G phones still out there are probably using the 2G network as a fallback. When this goes out too, they will be left without a network.
If you’re affected by this, you should probably contact T-Mobile as soon as you can to get yourself on a 4G/5G device.
Thanks hihi217 for the tip!
