#Your Ancient Smartphone Will Stop Working on Sprint Networks January 1st, 2022 – Review Geek

T-Mobile and Sprint merged to become one company in April of 2020, but Sprint’s legacy network still exists to support old devices. That may change soon, as a notice sent by T-Mobile to its business customers states that the Sprint CDMA networks will shut down “on or around” January 1st, 2022.

Phones with Voice over LTE (VoLTE) support will continue to work with T-Mobile and Sprint. This change only affects old CDMA-only devices that lack 4G LTE support. If you see an LTE icon at the top of your phone, then you’re fine.

Looks like CDMA Shutdown Day for Sprint is 1/1/22 or thereabouts, per this letter I got from T-Mobile.

I’m curious how much of Sprint’s LTE network will be online at that point. Betting that on 1/1/22 it’ll be down to the PCS G block plus B26. pic.twitter.com/dMan26HLox

— Ian Littman (@iansltx) December 27, 2020

But if you’re feeling nostalgic for your old Nexus, then you better start using it now. T-Mobile and Sprint will stop activating CDMA-only phones on January 1st, 2021. You need to activate your old phone before 2021 if you want to use it for one last year.

We should expect to see more legacy networks shut down as carriers transition to 5G. T-Mobile and Verizon plan to shut down their 3G networks by January of 2021, and AT&T aims to end 3G service at the beginning of 2022. The average person won’t notice that 3G is gone, but people using older devices will need to upgrade.

Source: Ian Littman via Android Police