According to foreign media reports, Taiwan, China officially terminated the operation of 2G wireless networks at midnight on Saturday. Except for emergency calls, telecom operators ended all cellular services running on their respective networks.
This move will affect mobile phones under various operators that have not yet moved to other networks, including about 60,000 China Telecom, 20,000 Taiwan Mobile, and 38,000 Telecom. After the
2G network is stopped, customers using the network will no longer be able to make any calls and calls (except emergency calls), send or receive text messages, or use their data services.
All 2G phones will not work properly, and their phone numbers will be retained until the end of December this year.
2G device users can purchase 4G devices at any telecom operator service center they serve and continue to use their original phone number.
Between July 1 and July 7, if Taiwan's 2G network mobile customers try to make a call, they will be transferred to the customer service center and can temporarily restart the mobile service if they agree to upgrade to the 4G network.
It has to be said that in terms of eliminating 2G networks, Taiwan is indeed ahead of the mainland.
There is no doubt that it is now the 4G era, and 5G networks are being continuously experimented, and the commercial use of 5G in China is about to come. At this time, 2G, as a historical existence, began to appear a little out of place.
In 2009, Japan's NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, and SoftBank announced that they would completely stop 2G services; in 2010, Finland's three major telecom operators also closed their 2G networks; in 2012, Telecom New Zealand and Telecom South Korea (KT) also closed their 2G networks; in December last year, Australian Telecom also announced that they had closed the ancient 2G network; in mid-last year, the US telecom giant Verizon also announced that it would shut down the 2G network in 2020; Singapore will ban the sale of 2G mobile phones and other communication devices from 2017, and it is expected that from April this year, Singapore's mobile operator will shut down the 2G network. Until the American telecommunications company ATT announced the official closure of the 2G network on January 1, 2017, an era came to an end.
For operators, it is inevitable that they will give up 2G networks. Although the three major operators have been guiding users to migrate to 4G networks, the costs of 2G networks and 4G networks are almost the same in terms of operational costs. In addition, the 2G network base station technology is relatively old and has high energy consumption. The three major operators have the most 2G users and the least profitable. The 2G networks in some regions even operate at a loss. More importantly, the continued use of high-quality frequencies used by 2G has led to a sharp increase in the construction cost of 4G networks of the three major operators, which is the real reason for shutting down the 2G network.
As a country with obvious differences, China has not announced the end of the 2G network. In December last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a document "Approval on Agreeing to China United Communications Group Co., Ltd. to adjust some frequency for LTE networking", approving China Unicom to use 2G and 3G spectrum resources for 4G networks, and to adjust China Unicom's 900MHz, 1800MHz, and 2100MHz for 4G networking, and allowing nationwide deployment.
Despite this, it is still difficult to get Chinese 2G users to withdraw from the network and use the 4G network. For example, 4G has poor coverage in remote areas, some 2G users (such as the elderly) do not have faster network demands, and operator package fees need to be innovated, etc. Although China Unicom is currently accelerating the withdrawal of 2G networks, and although my country's large and medium-sized cities have already popularized 4G networks, the one-size-fits-all 2G network shutdown is indeed not suitable for the current national conditions.
