In a mobile climate where smartphones are more about connecting to e-mail, instant messaging, and apps than it is about making calls, is there room for a slow mobile Internet infrastructure from the past?
T-Mobile says no. Even though it is the last carrier to announce the push into 4G LTE, the new standard in mobile connectivity, T-Mobile is the first to begin the process of killing off 2G.
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2G, which stands for “second generation,” is what most mobile consumers used as their first experience with mobile Internet. The service was usually only available through a carrier-branded proprietary browser that was specifically designed to download and upload extremely small amounts of data.
Today, that sounds unequivocally antiquated. So for T-Mobile, shutting down its old 2G infrastructure will help it pave the road for its emerging LTE network.
This is a radical solution to what many carriers have been concerned about – the limited amount of mobile spectrum left in the US airwaves. T-Mobile is bypassing that issue altogether by essentially tapping into its existing spectrum and just remolding it.
T-Mobile already has a “4G” network in place, but it uses a standard called HSPA+, which is only a marginal upgrade from what consumers have come to expect from a 3G connection. Other mobile players and analysts disapproved of T-Mobile even referring to its new network as 4G.
But now, LTE has become the standard adopted by everyone. Verizon has a very large LTE network built up, followed by AT&T. Sprint has started laying the groundwork, and now T-Mobile has some catching up to do.