A number of mobile operators, including O2 and EE, have already set out tentative plans for phasing-out existing 2G mobile services. But new data supplied by rural connectivity provider Wavemobile suggests that quite a few connections are still 2G-only, and thus closing the service will be more complex than the prior 3G switch-off.
Just to recap. The government and all major UK mobile operators have already agreed to phase-out existing 2G and 3G signals by 2033 (here), which will free up radio spectrum bands so that they can be used to further improve the network coverage and mobile broadband speeds of more modern 4G and 5G networks, as well as future 6G services. The switch-off will also reduce the operators’ costs and power consumption.
So far, EE and Vodafone have already completed their 3G switch-off (here and here), while Three UK has largely almost completed it too (here) and O2 are due to start the process in April 2025 (here). However, the 3G switch-off was not a perfect process, and some areas haven’t yet seen an improvement in 4G to compensate. But other areas did see improvements and, generally speaking, the phasing out of 3G has been a relatively smooth process.
The story for 2G was always going to be more complicated than 3G, not least because older 2G signals remain useful as a low-power fallback when 3G, 4G or 5G isn’t present and are still necessary for some rural areas, as well as for particular applications (e.g. certain Internet of Things (IoT) / M2M services and energy Smart Meters).
Nevertheless, EE is about to start the process of encouraging some customers to move off 2G and on to their more modern (4G and 5G) network, although the provider has made clear that they “will not be closing our 2G network until later this decade“ (here). Similarly, O2 expects to start shifting their first customers off 2G this year (here), but like EE they haven’t yet set a solid date for the final switch-off and expect the process to take some time.
Wavemobile’s Findings
For those who don’t know, Wavemobile operates a Small Cell based network and has around 40 active cells in “total not-spot areas” (i.e. usually serving rural communities and tourist areas). For example, West Wales, the Lake District and Scotland have the most density, but this is still quite a tiny network at the moment, at least in comparison to the major mobile operators.
Generally, devices (e.g. Smartphones and other mobile networking kit) will only access their network if they have nothing else available from their home operator, which means that Wavemobile is able to see some connectivity trends that might otherwise go unnoticed.
For example, Anthony Timson, Wavemobile’s Technical Director, recently provided ISPreview with some visibility around the number of 2G vs 4G devices that have accessed their network over the past year – between January 2024 and January 2025. The results reveal that they saw a total of around 1.67 million device connections (includes roaming users) and around 13.4% of those (225k) were still 2G-only.
Anthony further noted that their own network marginally increased in size over this period, and it’s very seasonal, but the number of non-4G capable devices doesn’t seem to be substantially dropping. We expect that quite a few of those 2G-only connections may be coming from IoT roaming SIMs, rather than consumers, but it’s harder to get a read on that.
Suffice to say that while such connections consume very little data, there are still quite a lot of them to tackle and that helps to illustrate why the 2G switch-off is going to be a much more challenging, and slower, process than the 3G one.