[X Style (Pure) General] acejavelin:
AT&T shutdown their 2G/Edge system in December of last year... ask a more rural AT&T (or Cricket) store employee who was working the first week of January how that went... Let's just say there was a fair amount of pissed off people who had to buy new devices and people were getting really good prices on their used stuff in the local classifieds. The "government" didn't step to stop them, it is an unregulated industry... they could shut down whole areas, cities, counties, even whole states, if they wished to because there is nothing stopping them, except the backlash in the media or by their customers which in all honesty could be huge. Cellular service is not considered "essential service" by FCC.

Carrier's don't really care about the less than 1% of users that would be effected by this, as of Q1 last year Verizon already had 98% of their physical area covered by LTE, probably 99.5% by year end... and honestly, I live and work in the "boonies" of North Dakota and my company has me issued a iPhone 6s, a VoLTE capable device, and I have been in some of the most remote areas and I have never seen that device go to 1X for a call or EVDO for data (EVDO does NOT carry voice, it is data only service) since receiving it. Verizon see's it as another way to sell more stuff... "Oh, your phone doesn't work now? Well, you need one of these shiny new ones over here." or "You don't have coverage now? Well, then you need one of these signal boosters or network extenders over here". And as far as MNVO's go, well, they will have to switch too, but most MVNO's don't plan out more than 3-6 months ahead so although this probably is on their radar it isn't a priority as of yet, but same goes for them because they can sell you something.

(Side note: this is only a North American thing... in most areas of the world cellular service and devices are completely separate businesses. The current US business model in the cellular industry does nothing but hurts consumers)

Remember, a voice call requires a minimal amount of data to function, less than anything else you might use. Let's take a worst case scenario, the AMR-WB codec (used for HD Voice) uses at peak 23.85kbps (kilobits). That’s one-way, making it 47.7kbps peak for both ways, but let's just say 48kbps to add a little overhead (VoLTE doesn't have the same overhead as IP technology), so that is 6kB/s of data to provide a MOS score in excess of 4.5. Doesn't take much signal at all for LTE to give that... if you have a connection at all you have those speeds, and that is worst case scenario, in general AMR-WB uses around 15kbps, and AMR (or AMR-NB, used for "standard" voice calls) can maintain a call with 4.75kbps (9.5kbps bi-directional) with a MOS score of 3.8, not bad at all actually.

You can whine/complain/think all you want, Verizon and T-Mobile are shutting down their 2G and 3G services in the near future... I would bet by December 2020 ALL of those networks will be shutdown completely in the US, the carrier's have these plans in place and it is happening, 5G is coming and they need the airspace for that network and to beef up their heavily loaded 4G networks, the cost per dollar of revenue hasn't been there in the 2G, and even 3G market, for several years.