iPhone 11 Pro Max LTE

[RL@78757]

1. How much longer will I be able to use LTE?

2. Will LTE become faster as more people use 5G?

Thanks!

 

[antiprotest]

5 years? 10 years?

 

[eyoungren]

1. How much longer will I be able to use LTE?

2. Will LTE become faster as more people use 5G?

Thanks!

I think you have quite a while (years). I bought an 11 Pro Max in February 2021. That's an LTE phone, no 5G. I'd be pretty upset if my carrier cut off LTE soon. In other words, LTE phones are still being sold.

3G is only being shut down just now. T-Mobile is shutting it off and Verizon is doing it at the end of the year I think. How long was 3G around? How many 3G only phones are still out there?

As far as #2, well, maybe. Most people are on LTE now. Once more of them shift to 5G that'll probably happen. But then your time on LTE will start to be less and less because most people will have moved on to 5G.

 

[eyoungren]

5 years? 10 years?

I'm thinking at least 10. 3G was around for quite a while and only now is being slowly shut off.

 

[Nbd1790]

Most likely until the next iteration of connectivity is introduced (whatever follows 5g/UC). LTE is still a reliable network and is only slow in comparison to 5G. As someone mentioned earlier, I'd say around a decade or so.

 

[Splitrail]

I think you have quite a while (years). I bought an 11 Pro Max in February 2021. That's an LTE phone, no 5G. I'd be pretty upset if my carrier cut off LTE soon. In other words, LTE phones are still being sold.

3G is only being shut down just now. T-Mobile is shutting it off and Verizon is doing it at the end of the year I think. How long was 3G around? How many 3G only phones are still out there?

As far as #2, well, maybe. Most people are on LTE now. Once more of them shift to 5G that'll probably happen. But then your time on LTE will start to be less and less because most people will have moved on to 5G.

Verizon pulled the plug (unannounced) on our 3Gs in the mountains of Central Arizona last October.
Then denied everything until, after talking to 4-5 different prople and jumping through multiple hoops, we found an individual who knew what was wrong.

 

[ian87w]

1. How much longer will I be able to use LTE?

2. Will LTE become faster as more people use 5G?

Thanks!

1. For quite some time. There’s still a need for a fallback, and LTE becomes the lowest common denominator, especially for voice. Even when 6G comes, if voice is still handled through VoLTE, LTE will stick around.

2. Yes and no. Yes, maybe, but since 3G is turned off, every cellular capable device will use LTE. So in the short term, LTE will be more likely to be congested until 5G is more widespread and people upgrade to 5G devices.

 

[JPack]

At least a decade.

5G shares spectrum with LTE so unlike 3G, they won’t need to sunset it to make room. If you look at 5G releases, much of it was designed to coexist with LTE. Most 5G deployments today are non-standalone.

 

[mdhaus72]

I was just up in Alaska on vacation...where cell phone service is more than a bit challenging in many areas. There were a few patches of LTE service that worked fine - But there were a lot of places where a 3G signal was all that was being broadcast. So I can imagine that 3G will continue to be around in some of the remote areas where it doesn't make sense to pay for infrastructure upgrades, but you still need to have some basic service connectivity.