I work for such a business customer. Again, the networks say it loud and clear. 2G will die. After 3G, but the precise date has not been fixed yet. Do not bet on that it will by more than a year after 3Gs death, which will be 2021.
Network providers have a history of cancelling out business contracts without prior warnings. They have done that with leased lines, which were used for alarm devices before they used 2G. They have done this with ISDN digital lines. They will keep doing that whenever they please. They donāt care.
āThen I am sure you can name at least one case.ā
Of course I can (cancelling of fixed lines despite having contracts), but I wonāt, because I want to keep my job there.
But the cancelling of ISDN lines despite contracts was nation-wide, so pick up your random customer, because all customers were affected without exemption. And with ISDN, they did it twice!
The latest cancellation was in 2018 when Telekom abolished ISDN altogether, but they did the same thing before, in the Nineties.
Telekom built ISDN exchanges (PBX) for large customers using a national-only ISDN standard. At that time, I worked for a different company. They trusted Telekom and spent some million Marks for a national ISDN PBX (1TR6 standard).
Much to the surprise of my employer, only a couple of years after that, Telekom announced the abolition of 1TR6 and declared, that the hugely expensive PBX they sold my employer could NOT be upgraded to the new European ISDN (DSS1) and declared that a completely new PBX must be purchased and installed and the āoldā one would be disconnected from the network because of āincompatibilityā.
My employer sued, and before a ruling in court was issued, Telekom gave in and built a new PBX at a non-disclosed, but said to be enormous rebate. And not only the PBX had to be exchanged, also several hundred (!) telephones had to be exchanged, too.
In the case of ISDN, Telekom was monopolist. For mobile operators you have a choice and if one operator keeps a 2G/3G network for longer, you can switch to that operator - and providing service to IoT devices / old phones / roaming from abroad (phones with incompatible LTE bands) may even be part of the business model of one of the operators for a few more years after the other networks have abolished old standards, as it gains them customers - a benefit of having competition in the mobile operator market which isnāt there for landlines.
Today there is no monopoly, but an oligopoly. There are only THREE network providers left in Germany, and they all will abolish UMTS and later on GSM. And competition did exist for landlines, and still exists. On landlines, in some cities you have more choice than on mobileā¦
Hi hman, I think your point is clear, that eventually both UMTS and GSM will disappear on mobile networks. But we have no timeline for that yet and no indication that it is immediate (except that many networks announced to end just one of the two.)
I agree that it is an important point to consider for the FP2ās future and that it already limits its use in some countries outside Europe, but this discussion is not going anywhere, so I would suggest closing the topic.
